Reviving a 160-Year-Old Petzval Lens

One of the most fascinating aspects of photography is that nothing is ever completely obsolete. With the right combination of creativity and improvisation, anyone can take old gear and adapt it to new cameras, or make repairs that let it shine once more. That is exactly what Austrian photographer Markus Hofstätter did when he visited a flea market dedicated to retro photography and found an impressive Petzval lens made by Gasc & Charconnet between 1860 and 1880. With a few tweaks and a good cleaning, the lens came back to life…

Mid-October we shared a video filmed with a World War I lens mounted on a modern camera. Obviously, it’s impossible to compare the results with what a current lens can do, but that warmth plus the inevitable optical flaws give us a pretty solid idea of how photography looked a century ago.

For some experts, though, that isn’t enough. One thing is combining hardware from different eras, and another is going back more than 150 years to adopt old techniques with historically correct elements. That journey brings us to the famous wet collodion process and lenses that look like actual cannons. I’m talking about Petzval lenses, designed by mathematician Joseph Petzval in 1840. One of those lenses, made by Gasc & Charconnet between 1860 and 1880, ended up in the hands of Austrian photographer Markus Hofstätter, who decided to “bring it back.”

The first step was to recreate a ring for the lens with the exact type of thread (something Hofstätter couldn’t do himself), and its construction was handled by Haumberger Fertigungstechnik. After that, he made several wooden mounts to install the lens properly, and finally focused on measuring both the focal length and the aperture. His calculations indicate the lens is 500 millimeters with an aperture between f/4.5 and f/4.7.

The first photo Hofstätter took with this lens was a portrait of professor Werner Sobotka, whom he considers “the Albert Einstein of photography.” And the images? All fabulous, with a unique profile, and the lens forces us to look at the center of the frame. If you want to see more of his work, or follow everything coming out of this lens, don’t hesitate to visit Markus Hofstätter’s official Instagram profile.

Source: PetaPixel