Samples: Lomography(Zenit) Petzval 85mm F2.2

With its plastic fantastic cameras and lenses some people won't go near Lomography. That said the petzval both benefits and suffers from being a product of a company that sees vignetting CA and other, normally, less than desirable design faults as major selling points.
The benefit:only a company like lomography would bring the Petzval "back to life".

Unfortunately the low tech side of the company means there are small niggling feature of the lens, that other companies would have fixed. In particular The waterhouse stop system.
Its fun to use but tilt the camera in any direction and the waterhouse stop will probably fall out, A simple spring loaded catch would have been in keeping with the 19th century steam punk theme and made the lense much more manageable.   As old as the design is its a demanding lens to get the best shots from. With (is this the best description?) a rack and pinion focusing system focusing is a challenge ( Manual focus assist on the A7r became a must use function when this lens is on the camera).   Theres only one reason to own this lens "BOKEH".

Getting the Bokeh this lens type is famous for is actually a challenge, I thought I would just throw in the 2.2 stop; point, shoot, and in the picture would be that famous swirl...nope!!!   It took a lot of practice to find out how to bring that swirling blur into play. You need a "full" background some distance behind the subject. The "some distance" varies according to the closeness of the subject to the lens.   Theres probably a formula to work it out..but Lomography's instructions are even less helpful than my poor attempt.






This last shot is included to show that swirl is not always that great( this shot makes me feel slightly sea sick)





Edited by Austrokiwi - 30 August 2014 at 06:09

I emailed Lomography about the stops tending to fall out of the lens. It seems they had considered that problem and had a solution designed into the stops. The solution was very low tech and not obvious( at least to me). On their sub web site are instructions on how to "calibrate the lens"    Seems one needs to adjust the stops slightly with some needle-nosed pliers. I have only one Rhetorical question: why hadn't they included that instruction in the packaging the lens came in? Heres the link to the page with the calibrating instructions:

http://microsites.lomography.com/petzval-lens/technical_information/

Edited by stiuskr - 01 September 2014 at 15:30