And so here is an impressionistic portrait of the lens, shot mostly at f/1.4, accompanied with M-Tron, the super Mellotron emulator, which I pumped whilst feeding it through the filters of a Korg MS-20:
Auto Chinon 55mm f/1.4: MOTHER COUNTRY LOVE HATE
Canon 5D MkII
Canon 5D MkII
That's what the bokeh looks like. There are things that the human mind cannot grasp, and yet they exist. One day the collective consciousness of humanity will encounter an immovable object, and we will not have been so unstoppable after all.
It has a 52mm filter thread. I like it, and in a subsequent post I will show you why. Not today.
8 comments:
I got the 50 1.4 from Chinon. don't think it's a Tomioka, but anyway.
The Bokeh of this lens (as yours) is very characteristic for me, as it yields circles at the borders of the disks.
Only thing that get me a bit is: No Multi Coating, leading to lots of ghosting and flare in contrasty situations. I'll put a sticker with CAUTION: Use with care in bright sunlight! on it :-)
Like your video, did I mention this already?
It's got an interesting character - at e.g. 25 seconds in it's very "busy" in the background. My copy of the lens actually has TOMIOKA written on the front, so I suppose you could use it as a template to see if other lenses are built the same (it has a kind of leather focus ring that's shrunk by about 1cm). Heavy; feels tough; right on the cusp of hitting the 5D's mirror.
Is it the same with Porst Auto Color Reflex 55mm f1,4?
I really need to do a proper post on this lens. It certainly looks physically the same as tne Porst 55mm f/1.4, e.g compare this:
http://m42.org.ua/452
With the shot of the lens here:
http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2011/03/carl-zeiss-50mm-f14.html
Same rusty-gold coating, similar finish.
I have the same 55/1.4 Chinon minus the "tomioka" badge, but including the "faux leather" ring. It is, by some distance, my favourite portrait lens. Bokeh is unlike anything I have seen anywhere else, including my takumars. Anyway, this leads me to two questions, maybe you know the answers, maybe not:
1)I have seen this "faux leather" look in several other lenses from Chinon and Revuenon, including a couple of wide angles (35/2.8, 28/2.8). Do you know if they were also made by Tomioka? (I like the 55mm so much that I really hope so).
2) I have read in several places that m42 prime lenses (of which I have become a fan on account of, among others, the Chinon 55) are not good as wide angles for DSLR's, not just because of the crop factor, but because of interference problems with the sensor. Is that so? Is there any exception? If you had to pick a wide angle m42 prime, which would be it?
Anyway, aside from that, I really wanted to congratulate you and thank you for your blog. It is one of the best-written things I have ever read on the internet, and I am enjoying the read inmensely. The photos are not bad either. Nor are the women. Keep it up.
I still haven't had a proper go at this lens, although the headline image here was shot with it (and a vaseline-smeared filter):
http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2011/10/evil-queen-ii.html
As I understand it older lenses don't work so well on digital cameras around the edges because they don't project light directly perpendicular to the photosites, and so the edges tend to vignette and have odd colour casts.
After writing this I went on an Olympus OM trip, and the 24mm f/2.8 and f/2 are wonderful things (the OM range had some great small primes). As a consequence I haven't really used any M42 wide angles - except for a Zeiss Jena 29mm which was very soft. The Zeiss Jena Flektogons were highly spoken of though, and there's a Tamron 17mm f/3.5 that's apparently very good.
I know this much -> <- about Tomioka. I wonder what happened to them?
Tomioka was absorbed by Yashika, which was absorbed by Kyocera, which eventually dropped the whole photography business. Nothing's left of them, except some vintage lenses scattered on ebay.
Tomioka was founded by a Japanese physicist after he returned from World War II. They specialized in making lenses for other brands; sometimes they included the "Tomioka" badge, but often not for corporate reasons.
Tomioka made what is currently considered the best (or at least the brightest) M42 lens, the 55/1.2 (much more expensive than the 1.4 and way out of my league). That lens was so close to the physical limits of the laws of optics that in fact a small bit had to be cut off from their back glass in order to make space for the auto/manual pin. In other words, 1.2 is not just the brightest M42 there was, it is beyond the size limits of the brightest m42 there can ever be.
Being a physicist myself, and a bit of a romantic, I like the story, and that is why I would like to think that there are some other bits of unbranded Tomioka stardust scattered around. They may not be any good, but who cares.
What a fascinating thread. I've been experimenting with my M42 Tomioka f/1.4 55mm using both a film SLR - a Yashica FX-3 and a SONY A200 DSLR. In both cases I acquired adaptors to mate the lens to the Yashica and SONY mounts. Here is one image I captured earlier today. I need to study this lens on the digital SONY in different situations and under different lighting and compare these with comparable film images recorded on the Yashica. My faux leather ring has also shrunk - but by less than 1/3 cm.
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