The new Petzval 85mm ( from a 1840 lens design)
This is a very special lens, with its design dating 1840, a design which underwent a major remake by the people at Lomography in Austria and was produced by the Zenith factory KMZ in Krasnogorsk Russia.
Made in brass and sporting a rack and pinion focussing mechanism it features a 4 elements in 3 groups design and had a waterhouse aperture system with inserting aperture slides.
Very old fashioned! The lens exudes character and is most definitely “ sui generis”.
It was the first of a line of photographic lenses characterized by their old fashioned design which took their inspiration from some classic optics of a very far past. To date, this line counts two Petzval Lenses 85mm, 58mm and a Daguerrotype Achromat of 64mm. All these lenses are capable to be used on a full frame format camera and smaller formats such as APS-C and smaller.
I chose to buy the 85mm Petzval lens in the Canon EF version and I have began using it with a Zhongyi Lens Turbo II Focal reducer (keeping it more or less the same focal length on a reduced aps-c sensor) on my Fujifilm X-T1, but later on I went into using a Canon EF adapter with continuous, stop-less, Iris aperture mounted in the adapter behind the lens, between lens and camera, in an atypical position. This aperture has somewhat aninfluence on contrast and just a little on the depth of field.
The lens has the so typical “ swirl” of the unfocused field behind the subject (these days called “ bokeh") and it is best used, to that effect, with portraits or other subjects showing head and shoulders and part of the upper body, or any other subject of more or less 1 meter on the long side against a background that includes backlit foliage or structures which will show the swirly bokeh.
But even a close up portrait ( generally at the closest possible focussed distance for this lens) has very nice rendering being very soft and very clement to the skin wrinkles, absorbig most imperfection in the softness of the image produced.
