Some years ago, I made another blog that was about film cameras, vintage lenses, and digital cameras. That blog is long since gone, but having discovered a few recent archived posts, I’m resurrecting some of them:
Before the digital camera takeoff, before Adobe Photoshop, before the Holga was a thing, before Lomography, and before plastic lenses were considered trendy, there was the Sima Soft Focus lens. It’s a 100mm f2 all plastic affair with a versatile T-mount (for maximum compatibility), deeply recessed single plastic lens element, and a manual trombone type focussing mechanism (otherwise known as – two cheap plastic tubes sliding over each other).
Mine is in pretty good condition but didn’t come with the original aperture disks. Still, they’re easy enough to make out of black card and can be slotted into the screw on plastic ring at the end of the lens. Sliding in smaller apertures will increase depth of field and cut out some of the dreamy effect of the soft focus shenanigans. But where’s the fun in that? The real retro charm of this lens is in using it for wide open dreamy photos that can’t be easily (if at all) reproduced in a program like Photoshop. Here are some gorgeous sunset photos from a garden:
The photo above almost looks like a multiple exposure doesn’t it? The highlights bloom and bleed and contrast is low, but the thin depth of field, chromatic aberration and ghosting lend this image an unusual character.
Resurrecting this post makes me want to use the Sima lens again! My apologies for the smallish example photos.
The Rusty Ruin Journal 