Hermagis Eidoscope Soft Focus Lenses

375mm F4.5 Hermagis Eidoscope Lens

275mm F4.5 Hermagis Eidoscope Lens

As the French ads read in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: “l’Eidoscope ne photographie pas, il dessine!” (It doesn’t take images; it draws them!), This tells me everything I want to know about this magnificent lens.

The Hermagis Eidoscope, renowned for its soft focus and ‘flou artistique’ effect, incorporates an achromatic lens design to minimize chromatic aberration while intentionally allowing other aberrations to create its signature artistic effect.

The soft focus effect of the Hermagis Eidoscope is produced by excessive spherical aberration in a rectilinear design.  The effect is controlled by aperture changes (wide open produces maximum softness, and stopping down lessens the effect).  The lens has an achromat doublet in front and one in the rear.  Stopped down, this lens is tack sharp, as expected from a design perspective.  

In achromat designs, especially for lenses intended for artistic purposes like the Eidoscope, a doublet (a pair of lenses) is usually used in each group. These doublets are composed of two types of glass with different refractive indices. This combination is crucial for minimizing chromatic aberration, which is important even in lenses designed for a soft focus effect, as excessive chromatic aberration can be distracting and detract from the overall image quality.

The front and rear doublets in the Eidoscope work together to control chromatic aberration and shape the nature of the soft focus effect, balancing sharpness and softness. The precise configuration of these doublets contributes to the unique rendering that the Eidoscope is known for, providing that distinctive ethereal quality without the harsh color fringing that would occur with simpler lens designs.

In traditional achromat designs, two types of glass with different dispersion properties bring two wavelengths of light into the same focal plane, thus reducing color fringing. However, the Eidoscope’s unique design serves a different artistic purpose.

In the case of the Eidoscope and similar soft focus lenses, the achromat design isn’t aimed at achieving perfect sharpness or eliminating all aberrations. Instead, it’s tailored to balance sharpness and softness, creating an image with a pleasing, dreamy quality while still maintaining enough definition to recognize subjects clearly. This is achieved through a specific configuration of lens elements that control spherical aberration and other imperfections to produce the desired soft focus effect.

The Eidoscope uses an achromatic doublet to control chromatic aberration, ensuring that the soft focus effect is not marred by unwanted color fringes, which would detract from the image’s aesthetic quality. Doing so maintains the artistic integrity of the image, allowing photographers to capture portraits and scenes with a gentle, ethereal quality that was highly prized in pictorialist photography and high society portraiture of the time.

The Eidoscope incorporates an achromat design to manage chromatic aberration, but it does so within the broader context of creating its signature soft focus effect. The lens is a masterful blend of optical precision and artistic intention, allowing photographers to explore a more impressionistic and emotive approach to image-making.

You can use the front or rear cell individually, making this lens a triple convertible.

The Hermagis Eidoscope appears to have been made in multiple focal lengths, including No.1 150mm, No.2 190mm, No.3 275mm, No.4 375mm, No.5 480mm, and No.6 635mm.

Summary of Key Selling Points From Historic Literature

• Eidoscope also suits the landscapes, forests, and all themes where the artistic feeling of the operator can manifest.
• Eidoscope works with a relative aperture of f/5, which allows studio snapshots even in poor lighting conditions. Closed at f/10 or f/20 [see the aperture scale conversion below], it gains considerable sharpness and depth of field and can replace the best rectilinear.
• Eidoscope can be used separately [front or rear element only], thus obtaining a single lens with twice the focal length of the complete combination.

Example Photos

I follow Daniel Waters on Flickr, and he has some really nice landscapes using the Hermagis Eidoscope lens that I love.

I will include a couple of his photos below to help show the beautiful qualities of this lens when it is used for landscapes versus traditional portrait work.

I will add examples of my work in the near future as I get the prints made.

The Hermagis Eidoscope is Much More Than a Lens – It Represents The Possibilities of a Dreamlike Idyllic World

In the halcyon days of yore, specifically from the year of our Lord 1841 until the waning years of the 19th century, the illustrious Petzval-type lens, with its soft focus, held dominion over the realm of portraiture photography.

Esteemed practitioners of the photographic arts favored its resplendent brightness despite its limitation to a central field of sharpness. In that era, a relentless pursuit of sharpness and the eradication of distortion were the twin holy grails sought by all manufacturers of photographic lenses. Brightness, coupled with these other virtues, formed the trinity of attributes upon which the optical advancements for photography were predicated.

The coveted sharpness across the entire field of the image came to fruition in the 1890s, borne upon the wings of several concurrent advancements. Foremost among these was the proliferation of dry plates from the 1880s, which, being of greater sensitivity than their collodion predecessors, permitted a greater stopping down of the diaphragm. Concurrently, the advent of new glass types facilitated the realization of solutions previously confined to the theoretical realm, heretofore unattainable with existing materials.

This renaissance in optics gave birth to the anastigmats in the subsequent decade. However, this victory over unsharpness was short-lived in its exclusivity. A new category of lenses, crafted for the discerning artist, soon emerged: the ‘soft focus’ lenses. These ingenious devices intentionally reintroduced certain aberrations — those very imperfections once anathema to lens crafters — to produce an effect most desirable, particularly amongst the pictorialists and the portraitists of high society.

Among the pantheon of these soft focus optics stands the Eidoscope, a masterpiece unveiled in 1903 by the venerable French firm Hermagis.

To the contemporary beholder, an image captured through this lens might be dismissed as a relic from a less refined age. Yet, this would be a grave misapprehension. For lenses of this era, such as the venerable Tessar or Protar, are still capable of competing with modern lenses in sharpness for non-technical applications.

The soft focus lenses of yore offered a delicate finish, a subtle halo surrounding the subject, blurring yet distinguishing the details — much lauded in an age when the piercing clarity of images had been achieved. This ethereal focus invoked a dreamlike, idyllic world, a romantic counterpoint to the unsettling rapid industrialization of the time.

A quote from the 1907 American publication Wilson’s Photographic Magazine:

“For years past opticians have been striving to eliminate the aberrations in lenses, and imdoubtedly the numerous improvements introduced during recent years in the construction of photographic lenses offer valuable advantages to the scientific, archaeological and technical photographer, through providing the means of obtaining perfect sharpness and mathematical exactitude. But it is quite otherwise for the artist, for whom these new qualities may be considered absolute defects, and opticians are now being encouraged to produce lenses which are not highly corrected, but which have in fact a certain amount of those very defects which they have hitherto striven to eliminate. By this means a desirable softness is obtained without flattening the picture.”

The Eidoscope, a term of profound etymology derived from the ancient Greek “εἶδος” (eidos, signifying “form”) and “σκοπέω” (skopéô, meaning “to observe”), heralds a paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of visual representation. This nomenclature is not merely a label but a manifesto, suggesting a departure from the notion of form as an absolute, self-contained entity. It signifies a dissolution of the rigid precepts that have long underpinned the photographic arts, echoing the foundational tenets espoused in seminal works such as ‘The Pencil of Nature’ by William Henry Fox Talbot. In Talbot’s vision, photography was a medium where nature imprinted itself upon the plate, free from the meddling hand of man.

However, the Eidoscope, both in name and function, introduces a revolutionary perspective, elevating subjectivity to the forefront of the photographic discourse. It posits that nature is not merely a static entity to be captured but is instead a dynamic spectacle that is perceived and interpreted through the individual lens of the observer. This philosophical pivot mirrors the sensibilities of the Impressionist painters, whose oeuvre defied conventional realism to embrace a more fleeting, personal impression of the world.

The Eidoscope’s legacy, therefore, is not confined to its optical qualities but extends to its ideological implications. It signifies a shift from the objective to the subjective, from a world depicted to a world perceived. In doing so, it aligns itself with the Pictorialist movement, which sought not just to document but to interpret, infusing each image with the unique spirit and vision of the photographer. The Eidoscope, therefore, is more than a tool; it is a testament to the evolving dialogue between the artist and their medium, a dialogue that continues to shape the path of photography to this very day.

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A translation from French to English from the above advertisement page:

“The name Eidoscope was adopted to designate the characteristic property of this new lens, which is to produce images according to the appearance of objects. In a portrait, for example, the eye cannot count the hair or the small wrinkles, no more than one would tell them before the model itself. In fact, and rightly, artists disapprove, in ordinary lenses, the dryness that results from too much sharpness in the small details. To alleviate this dryness we have the retouching feature with the risk of softening the essential features too much, which compromises the resemblance and often fakes the physiognomy.”

Like Hermagis, an esteemed optical manufacturer since at least 1845, as noted by Agostini, Berthiot was also a traditional and renowned firm. My 275mm lens has the Nerthiot signature.

Founded by Claude Berthiot in 1857, it rose to prominence and by the twentieth century had become the most prolific French manufacturer of photography and cinema lenses. In 1913, the company was rebranded as SOM, Société D’Optique et de Mécanique Berthiot, and in 1934 it acquired Hermagis. Despite this merger, only a select few of Hermagis’s offerings, notably some graphic lenses and the Eidoscope, were retained in the SOM Berthiot portfolio.

The Eidoscope, particularly celebrated for its ‘flou artistique’ effect, continued to be offered in focal lengths of 10.8 inches (275 mm), 14.8 inches (375 mm), and 18.9 inches (480 mm). These corresponded to formats of half plate (approximately 5.1×7.1 inches), whole plate (approximately 7.1×9.4 inches), and 9.4×11.8 inches, respectively. The aperture of these lenses, which had evolved from f/5 to f/4.5 during Hermagis’s tenure, was maintained. Additionally, the traditional brass finish was replaced with a more modern black finish.

Initially, SOM Berthiot continued to imprint the name ‘Hermagis Paris’ on the Eidoscopes to leverage the esteemed reputation these lenses had garnered among photographers. This legacy and branding strategy are evident in the historic catalog pages, a testament to the enduring quality and influence of the Eidoscope in the world of photography.

Mounting the Lenses

REFERENCES

Informative article (scroll down to the Eidoscope section:

https://www.galerie-photo.com/soft-focus-objectif-portrait-flou.html

Flick photos tagged with “Eidoscope” – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/eidoscope/