A Rare Titus Caesar Quinarius and Vintage Optics

Ahhhh..... The Destruction of Ant Colonies by the Mighty Sun Laser. War of the Worlds (ORIGINAL film version), inspired my Death Rays on the Evil Ants...

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I used to collect vintage optics and still have many though will never again use a piece of film (I'm a big fan of digital). There are two features that are important for selecting old optics. First is color correction. To accomplish this a lens must have at least two elements of properly selected glass types. Most better lenses had six elements or more. The other is anti reflection coating. This invention allowed more complex lens designs since the internal reflections of uncoated lenses made some three element lenses better in some ways than other more complex designs.

Before buying my first dSLR with interchangeable lenses, I used a 1960's vintage xerox copy lens as an accessory close up lens om by (now antique) point and shoot digital camera. The lens had great sharpness and coating and worked very well. Most people in that time did close ups with one element accessory diopter lenses that added horrible color fringing to the images. Back in the day of Black and White photography, color fringing was less a problem since you could minimize it by using a small aperture. My image below shows how much difference this made in 2003. Buying a camera capable of close focus without accessories made this sort of problem go away for most purposes.



http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/ph2003.html
For small images for online use, my 2003 images were as good as my best of 2016 but enlargements of 20x30" size show we have come a long way since then. Good images using film cameras were not quite as easy as today's digitals. Between the two we compromised principles and accepted lower quality because it was just so much easier. Today, I'm happier with my digital images than I am with my view camera cutfilm results from 50 years ago (which are fading fast in boxes in the closet).

 

In the old days I shot close, close with a flea market surplus 1920's vintage Leitz microscope. It did decent work but there are much better ways today so it is in the closet with so many other pieces of my life never to be used again. I apologize for the tiny image but when it was first posted, most people used 14.4k modems and big images online were not a good thing. I may still have the larger scan from a color print but I have no idea where it is. This shows a bit of the surface of a sestertius with globs of alloyed metals and scratches.

 

I'm always intrigued by the old cameras I see in antique shops. Perhaps someday I'll buy a few and fool around with them. Does anyone even develop film anymore, or do you have to do it yourself?

I had a very nice denarius of Titus last week, which I was able to possess for about a day. Easy come, easy go. But this as of Vespasian arrived today and hopefully that's close enough, Aequitas...

 

Using film camera for photography is basically dead. When digital was first becoming popular the "professional" photographers were boldly stating that digital will never be better than film. How that quickly changed, its still odd that if you major in arts in an university, they still make you take film photography. I just can't imagine processing the film, dodging the image and all that when you can basically click a button and get an image within a second.