Photography Basics – Shooting with old (cheap) soft focus lenses

by Mickey Rountree

I’m going to show you a couple of older soft focus lenses that can be bought cheaply used on Ebay or other sites. They are great for portraits and still lifes and can spark your creativity by giving your images a different and unique look. The main characteristics of these older lenses is a lot of chromatic aberration and highlights that flare dramatically. The look is different from just putting a soft focus filter on the front of the lens, or blurring the image in Photoshop. I tend to use these lenses with dark backgrounds, because a light subject on a white or light background can quickly become a mess of smeary highlights.

When these articles are converted to PDF and sized for the newsletter, the resolution and quality of the images is seriously degraded. If you would like to read the article and see the images as I did, you can see this article on my website at this link.

https://mickeyrountree.smugmug.com/Articles/Basic-Photography-Series/

The first lens I’ll discuss is the 100mm Sima soft focus lens that was introduced in the late 1970’s. It is simply a one element lens with push/pull slide focusing. The lens itself is not camera brand specific; it uses a “T-mount” adapter that screws on to the back of the lens and is available for most manufacturer’s lenses. I have adapters for my Canon EF, and EF-M lenses, and there are T-mounts for even the newer Canon R lenses. Obviously there is no autofocus capability and no adjustable diaphragm, so there is no auto exposure mode. However, they will work fine in manual or aperture priority on most cameras. Straight from the box, the Sima is an f/2.0 lens and between the very shallow depth of field and blurry viewfinder image, focus is also a challenge. The Sima comes with f/4 and f/5.6 aperture disks to increase DOF and decrease the highlight flaring, and a 2stop neutral density filter. That decreases brightness without decreasing flare and softness.

Right now there are several available on EBay ranging from $15 to $60, and a T-mount will cost around $10 to $20, so you could be shooting for under $30.

Here is an image shot with a 100mm macro lens to show you how the image looks sharp.

At f/2 the Sima is smear of flared highlights.

With the f/4 aperture disk added, there is less flare.

The 100mm Spiratone Portragon came out around 1976. It is a single element 100mm f/4 lens with a helical focusing mechanism that is easier to use than the Sima. Again this lens uses the T-mount, and there is no autofocus capability and no adjustable diaphragm, so there is no auto exposure mode. However, they will work fine in manual or aperture priority on most cameras.