Testing early lenses

Lenses were essential in the early days of photography and optical understanding had to evolve in order to produce lenses more suited to the requirements of photography. Today we assume that our modern lenses are immesely superior to those produced in the early days. Some makers did use such technical mechanisms suc as ray tracing (now computerised and very fast) but did so by literally tracing out ray on large sheets of paper. Thomas Grubb of Dublin was an early adopter of ray tracing and I have been testing some of the lenses he produced. Using a customised Arca Swiss camera I have been able to 'step & repeat' images and then stitich them together to produce images in the size formats for which the lenses were intended. So here are a couple of 1/4 plate shots which show surprisingly high quality. They contain some artifacts as a result of many variables but do give a good imression of the capabilities of the lenses from the 1860s.

Perhaps I should add that a scene of Lochranza was photographed by Thomas Annan of Glasgow in 1862. He owned and used a Grubb lens and it is quite possible that he used it to photograph Lochranza. A print of his photograph is in the National Library in Edinburgh.

12800068691?profile=RESIZE_710x

12800071275?profile=RESIZE_710x

You need to be a member of British Photographic History to add comments!

Join British Photographic History

Email me when people reply –