Soft-Focus 2.2 85mm

Anyone who know this lens first-hand or has one to sell?

Seems to be an interesting lens.

regards, Frank

I have this lens. M 85 soft 2.2
I love it to death.
Won't sell (mines well used...it shows..)
here's the low down....
with my ds2, I use the 85 (85x1.5=128mm) with a 1.7af teleconverter to make approx 218 mm portrait lens.

the image softness is controlled by aperture...ie f2.2 is very soft, f5.6 is fairly sharp. f5.6 is smallest aperture on the lens. you need nd filters for sure with this lens!

the image starts out sharp in the center and falls of to soft edges.
that means with the crop factors mentioned above you're using the sharper area of the lens with digital.

I find f4 gives pleasing results for glam portraits. (portraits require breaking the rules and getting the eyes dead center of the frame to make the eyes sharp.

I also find that bracketing "Sharpness" and blending layers in photoshop gives great results for other types of subjects like landscapes.

sure you can soften in photoshop, but the out of focus areas this lens creates are veery pleasing, as are the 3d globes of light (halos) you can get off specular highlights in a dark scenic.

This is going to be totally unhelpful probably, but I had one of these and found it totally useless.

It may well be that it just depends on your style of photography...

So you have one vote for and one against now. You'll need to try it for yourself I'm afraid.

Good point JR.
I like soft focus. Don't mind grainy...in fact, my favorite images would get shredded at a Professional Photographers of Canada competition.
I can create images that they'd like, but I wouldn't much care for them.

Nick Vedros lectured at the conference I attend recently.http://www.vedros.com/

I like his position that one has to create what the client wants, but always "one for thee and one for me" he said often, the clients wind up loving his vision more than their original concept. You have to make images that you love and let your enthusiasm win the clients over.

If you're doing portaiture, or even nudes, for paying customers, do they want "sharp" or "atmospherical" pictures?

I mean, soft is different from unsharp. For soft portraits I can either use a 1.4/85 or a not so modern 2.8/85 and use it wide open, but then there is point sharpness in the eyes and not much depth of field.

Or I can use a Sonnar type 1.5/50 (also wide open) on a RF camera, but then there is not much DOF either, and no control in the finder at all.

I thought the 2.2/85 of Pentax would be helpfull in this respect. It combines larger DOF (at f/4 or f/5.6) with some pleasant softness.

But I noticed they are quite rarely occuring at the market. With just 2 elements, I suspect it wasn't particular expensive when new?

You can call me crazy, I have the SMC-K 1.8/85 (which is "too sharp" for my kind of portraiture), an old (1960) Auto-Takumat 1.8/85 (better!) and even a super-rare 1.9/83 in M42 (which was Pentax first "highspeed glass", but I'm even looking for that "special"...

So, if you have one to sell, gimme a shout (taunusreiter @ yahoo.de)

regards, Frank