Has someone tried to shoot with a Photar ?

[Angora]

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Shooting a non-macro subject with a Photar 12,5 mm for example ?

 

[dkCambridgeshire]

Can you get the lens close enough to the film plane to shoot a non macro subject?

 

Dunk

[gvaliquette]

Can you get the lens close enough to the film plane to shoot a non macro subject?

 

Dunk

 

I think Dunk is right. You must use a bellows for focussing, as the lens does not have a focussing mount, and, even with the 50mm Photar, you cannot focus at infinity with the extension provided by the bellows and Photar mounting adapter.

 

Photars are designed for macro work and cannot be used as general purpose lenses.

 

Guy

[dkCambridgeshire]

Just out of curiosity and using a very rough and ready method ie no focusing rack ... have set up an SL2 fitted with a Photar adaptor on a tripod ie no bellows used ... and in front of the camera set up another tripod with a magic arm/super clamp holding a steel ruler ... then screwed my 3 Photar lenses into the adaptor and focused on the ruler by sliding the whole tripod back and forth ... when focused, the distance (a) from the lens front to ruler was measured ... and the mm. widths ( of the ruler visible across the whole 36mm width of the viewfinder were noted ... thus the magnification 36/b was calculated

 

Results as follows:

 

50mm Photar: a = 25cm, b= 140mm , mag = 0.25

 

25mm Photar a= 3cm , b= 22mm, mag = 1.6

 

12.5mm Photar a= 3cm, b= 6mm mag = 6.0

 

The wider angle Photars do not function as wide angle lenses ie there was no background visible in the viewfinder ... subject to lens front distances of just 3cm could never be practical for ordinary wide angle photography ... anything visible in the background using the 50mm lens was blurred ... I did not stop the lenses down

 

Conclusion: Fairly useless exercise which proves Photars should only be used on bellows for the purpose of macrophotography :) ... they do not work as wide angle or normal lenses .. at least not with an slr camera.

 

Dunk

[Guest rubidium]

Dunk is right on. Photars are essentially low-power microscope objectives (and, I might add, very good ones at that). Even the thread conveys that message. As such, they require small lens-to-subject distances and the depths-of-field are very small - progressively diminishing (inversely with the square of the aperture dimension) as you go from 50-->25-->12.5mm. These factors make them impractical for other than macro work with a bellows. But for macro work, along with great care on the part of the photographer, they give exceptional image quality.

Jim

[Angora]

Well I didn't think about the lens to film plane distance, indeed

 

Thanks for your thoughts guys, and for your feedback Duncan.

We definitely know Photar are not usable in a « regular » way, without bellow

[dkCambridgeshire]

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I recall reading some years ago about a natural history photographer who used a Canon FD camera with an extension tube and the Canon 35mm macrophoto lens for insect photography 'in the field' ... but he was very familiar with the setup and could place it exactly where it needed to be at fixed focus (just a few cm. ) from the subject. That is probably possible with the 25mm or 50mm Photar but would not be easy. And would not work with timid subjects.

 

Dunk