The Eye of the Eagle

The Talented Tessar

The reason for this post is that I realised how many of my cameras have lenses that are either Tessar or copies of that lens design. The Schneider Xenar, the Ross Xpress on the Ensign 1620 also the Fuji 150W that I use for large format; obviously the lens on the Rollieflex T and the Tessar on the Zeiss Ikon and Rollei 35T.

Back in the distant days where most photographers used glass plates and large wooden cameras the most common lens was of the Cooke triplet type. 

Complex lens design was expensive and because designers needed to limit the amount of air-glass surfaces to aid light transmission and keep down flare, correction of aberrations was very difficult to achieve.
So in 1902  when Paul Rudolph's Tessar design was put on the market by Zeiss it quickly established itself as a standard for others to emulate and earned itself the nickname 'Adlerauge' (Eagle eye). The four element design carefully mixed both high and low refractive glass and followed it with a cemented pair which reduced aberrations compared to the triplet designs.
One of the things I like most about the design is the higher contrast due to fewer elements, stopped down a couple of stops and they can compete with later Planar (5 and 6 element) designs even in corner sharpness.
Tessar types remained the standard by which others were judged until the 1950's when lens coatings made multi element lenses practical with their better correction and faster apertures.

Tessar f3,5 Rolleiflex T

Don't underestimate the humble Tessar it is a very capable lens capable of rendering wonderful images.

The Classic 150 f6.3 with 'modern' coating.

Over the last hundred years the Tessar has found itself on many iconic camera bodies and has been re computed to allow for both wide and telephoto versions; hopefully it will remain a useful design for many years to come.

Zeiss Ikonta 520/2

The Zeiss Ikonta was designed by Dr August Nagel shortly after which he left Zeiss to form his own company Nagel Werke who eventually became part of Kodak and made great cameras such as the Retina.

The camera above is a 1932 model with 105 mm F4,5 Tessar lens which because of the age is uncoated, despite this it is a well renowned optic and during the time of manufacture one of the best lenses available.

The shutter is a Compur 'leaf shutter' type with speeds 1/250 down to 1 second plus B & T, in which the T setting is used by hitting the release once to open and again to close and is useful in dark conditions when on a tri-pod, probably would make a nice astro photo 'star trails' setting for several hour long exposures.

The apertures run from F4,5 to F32 and are changed using a lever under the lens.

On the back you can see two red windows, the left is for advancing the film 6x9 (8 exposures) the right is used in conjunction with an insert (nearly always lost) to give '645' (16 exposures)

Also in the picture you can see the Albada view finder which is used for framing only, the focus point being guessed- you needed a Super Ikonta model for rangefinder focus.

Inside the back is an advert for Zeiss 'Pernox' film

Operation

When you consider how old this camera is (it was produced in the year Hitler came to power) it works very well, all speeds seem to work, the bellows is without holes and the Tessar is free of scratches.

The uncoated Tessar is pretty sharp, probably short of Rolleiflex or Hasselblad Zeiss lenses by a margin but impressive considering the age and very useable in but the most demanding conditions.

The camera is quite a challenge compared to modern SLRs as pretty much everything is guessed, the focus distance, the exposure, the shutter is manually cocked before exposure the wind-on has no lock making double exposure a danger should you forget to advance (also nice for some effects). The alabada finder although yellow with age is reasonably accurate for infinity work closer work is more problematic.

The lens has a minimum focus of 5 feet which makes it none to useful for head and shoulder type portraits full length being the best you can hope for:

The above is a shot on closest focus at around F8, note the chopped of feet due to parallax error.
This image was a real test, loaded with ISO 100 film guessed exposure of 1/25 at F4,5 at roughly 25ft distance- actually turned out surprisingly well.

You can clearly see the wires (see enlarged section top right) in this shot of the Jewelers shop proving the old Tessar is quite up to the task for most infinity type work. I'd not be quite so happy to shoot portraits because of the 5ft minimum focus. Finally just a colour shot, Fuji 400H 1/250 at F11

In all I really liked the Ikonta, will probably look for a later Super Ikonta with a coated Tessar ultimately.

I now have quite a collection of folding cameras, and really like the big negative small package they are great cameras available in some cases for very little money (I paid £18 for this one) and despite their very manual operation they can be fun.

© Photo Utopia 2009