The Lomography Petzval Portrait Lens

Here is a novelty, but at $500 an expensive one. This is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with a kickstarter (Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects. We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, more than 4.5 million people have pledged over $718 million, funding more than 45,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.)

The Lomography Petzval Lens attached to analogue Canon and Nikon SLRs.

In the 19th Century, the vast majority of photos were shot with the extremely popular Petzval lens. The lens was invented by Joseph Petzval in Vienna in 1840 and had a huge impact on the development of photography. Photos shot with a Petzval lens are immediately recognizable for their sharpness and crispness, strong color saturation, wonderful swirly bokeh effect, artful vignettes and narrow depth of field. The totally distinctive look of Petzval photos is all about the fantastic lens design that gives you the satisfaction of the instant optic experience that goes far beyond using photo editing software and filters.

For this Kickstarter project, we are reinventing the Petzval Lens for 21st century photographers and videographers. It doesn’t matter whether you shoot analog or digital; the brand new Lomography Petzval Portrait Lens is designed to work withCanon EF and Nikon F mount cameras. So, for the first time, you can easily get the fantastic Petzval photographic look with 35mm analog cameras and DSLR cameras too. This will bring with it a whole new world of possibilities; from shooting Petzval photos with your 35mm SLR or DSLR, to creating amazing DSLR movies with the lens!

The Petzval Portrait Lens is a high-quality glass optic; it’s a must-have lens for anyone looking to enhance their creative potential and turn every photo into a timeless artwork.

Expected delivery date of the lenses is on February 2014. However, we are confident to have the first 1000 lenses shipped out by December 2013.

The Story of The Original Petzval Lens

When the original Daguerre & Giroux Camera was introduced in 1839, it used a lens designed by Charles Chevalier. This camera marked the very beginning of modern analog photography and was of fundamental importance. But Chevalier’s lens had several problems. It had a slow, small aperture of f/15; this meant that even in bright sunlight, exposures could take 10 minutes or more.

Joseph Petzval was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Vienna and worked on a rival lens design which was introduced in 1840 (by the way, as well as being the place where Petzval lived, Vienna is the home of Lomography!). At f/3.6, Petzval’s large aperture design was about 20 times faster than the Chevalier lens and produced photographs which were extremely sharp at the focused area.

Obviously, the original Petzval lens was designed in order to work with the cameras manufactured in the 19th century. Most of these cameras were large-format analog cameras. It’s extremely hard to find a Petzval lens today which works easily with smaller format cameras. The new Lomography Petzval Portrait lens changes all this and allows you to enjoy the magic of the Petzval lens optic using your analog or digital SLR camera.

 

Lomography releases bellows film camera

As if by magic, one story about the Lomo comes along and then there is another. I had said that Lomo had invented and produced a number of funky odd cameras but they also have made some which are a bit more serious and this is clearly one from that stable. The article, by Ariane Osman in the BJP gives the information you are probably not completely interested in but also think it might be fun to engage with film either again or for the first time.

The Belair X 6-12 is a new 120 film camera that gives users the ability to switch between normal automatic shutter speed and long exposure. The camera can also shoot pictures in three formats – regular 6×9, square 6×6 or panoramic 6×12.
The new model is an interchangeable lens system that allows the attachment of a 90mm standard lens or a 58mm wide-angle lens. Lomography is said to be developing more lenses for the Belair X 6-12 in a bid to create an entire medium-format platform.
The camera is available in three models: the City Slicker Edition for £249; the Jetsetter Edition for £299; and the Globetrotter Edition for £244.

The Belair X 6-12 will be available in December. For more details, visit www.lomography.com.

Here are a selection of the Lomo cameras available from lomography.com there is the fish eye, the spinner, the multishot, the plastic, the gold, from humble beginnings there is now an empire, prices start from about £40, the shop sells cameras, accessories, film everything you need and the galleries have lashings of inspiration

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2219240/lomography-releases-bellows-film-camera#ixzz2D2fyQoLB
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Did the Lomo camera save film photography?

Lomo Cameras were part of a retro craze when film was still the only way to make photographs. This article on the BBC website By Stephen Dowling gives some of the history and reasons why the little Lomo camera became so popular. I have one of the original LC-A Lomo cameras, sadly it almost never gets an outing these days.

It was a nervous time for film photography when digital cameras took off in the 1990s, and seemed set to take over entirely. But with some help from Vladimir Putin – then deputy mayor of St Petersburg – the little Lomo camera became a retro cult classic, and showed film had a bright future.

In 1991, a group of Austrian art students on a trip to nearby Prague found, in a photographic shop, a curious little camera.

Black, compact and heavy, the camera was rudimentary. The lens was protected by a sliding cover. Loading, focusing and rewinding were all done by hand.

After developing the shots, the students found it produced pictures unlike anything they had seen before.

The colours were rich and saturated, an effect heightened by the lens’s tendency to darken the corners of the frame to create a tunnel-like vignetting effect, and there were dramatic contrasts between light and dark. The Austrians were hooked, and so were their friends when they showed them the results back home in Vienna. READ MORE HERE

There is a huge Lomo movement and the production of odd fun cameras with time lapse, or multiple lenses helped to spread the interest, in almost an ironic way what started as a niche or specialist home spun interest camera has spawned a flash website with galleries and a global community, here is a link to the Lomo site

Characteristics of the camera that appealed to those seeking something different were

• Vignettes – the Lomo’s shots show a characteristic vignette at the edges, like tunnel vision
• Bold colours – a Lomo hallmark, especially with cross-processed slide film
• Long shutter speed – the Lomo LC-A’s shutter stays open for as long as it needs to expose a photo, which can lead to interesting light trails
• Expired film – the LC-A’s lens suits the warped coloured shifts found on cheap, expired film
• Small size – the best camera is the one you have with you, and the LC-A fits in a jacket pocket

An Introduction to Lomography

Lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, “happy accidents,” and alternative film processing.  Born out of a love for the Russian based LC-A camera manufactured by state run LOMO, the Austrian based, Lomographische AG is the company that produces a handful of cameras now that live by their funky effects and designs.

In a hobby that’s almost all digital, Lomography is all film based and has a huge following, one that seems to continue to grow.  While iPhone apps like Hipstamatic are extremely popular they simply don’t have the romance that film cameras can. Loading film, choosing which shots you will take, having the film processed and waiting for prints to be made is extremely

One of the main purposes of Lomography is to encourage snapshot photography.  While most people work on becoming more professional with their photography, the goal of Lomography is to have fun shooting, then enjoy whatever comes out…...more

Lomo Look

A while ago there was a great interest in poorly engineered Russian cameras that gave distortions in terms of colour and sharpness to the images it produced. The Lomo camera became a short lived star towards the end of the film era and the main factor affecting the way it produced images was the plastic quality of the lens. Even today there are many websites that laud Lomo images, there are fans and followers of things Lomo. In recent years the company was bought to save it from extinction and of the basis of the cult of Lomo has had significant success in many ways including introducing a range of film based cameras that could take multiple images at the same time.

 

The Lomo look is coveted by some digital users and there are many tutorials on how to get the Lomo look. As the choice of film and processing had a great impact on the way that the image looked it is less to do with the camera than the process so there may be many different Lomo like tutorials. These two are a before and after on one type of photoshop conversion and here is a YouTube vid tutorial on how to achieve the result.

Bruce Elder, journalist, Sydney Morning Herald

What do you think? Is this a technique that might freshen up some of your images? Let me know if this tutorial is useful and the sort of thing you want brought to you via this blog.