I love menisci (what a strange sentence to write). That would be the plural of “meniscus” (Greek for “crescent”) that refers to a lens type, not your kneecaps. Although there are many varieties that go by this generic name, the basic shape does resemble a kneecap.
After Petzval lenses — that’s another story — meniscus lenses are rather hot these days among large format photaku and there’s something ironic about that. You see, a meniscus represents the first and simplest lens historically used in photography. And the type used was invented more than two decades before photography was invented. In 1812 , English scientist William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) discovered that if you put the concave side of a meniscus facing forward, you obtain a flatter field, which was an improvement although other distortions persisted. Thus was born the Wollaston Meniscus.
The irony about the current vogue for menisci kicks in once you consider that ever since the Wollaston Meniscus, lens design has been basically a story of incremental fixes to the optical aberrations inherent in the meniscus, namely: spherical, chromatic, coma, and astigmatism. I’ll leave the details of that for another day, but you can get a compact and engagingly written overview of the progress in nineteenth-century lens development here. The point in today’s musing is that after a century of hardworking lens designers striving to eradicate the imperfections of the meniscus to produce the sharpest, clearest, fastest lens possible, many photographers are actively seeking out those imperfections in simple menisci. I am one of them.
Why go backwards to something technically inferior? Full exploration of this query will be the aim of a later full-scale article. The short answer might be simply that the results of such a lens can produce cool effects, depending on your definition of cool. And these effects are tantamount to in-camera Photoshopping for those who don’t (want to) use Photoshop to achieve certain “artistic” effects. In the case of a simple meniscus, the most prominent aberration is chromatic; i.e., the lens bends different wavelengths (colors) of light differently. In color photography chromatic distortions appear as haloes of color shifts around edges of objects. In black and white, the effect is an auratic glow, a kind of ethereal, angelic halo around objects under the right light conditions, such as in this photo I recently took with a simple meniscus salvaged from a larger barrel lens:
The thin, light little lens I took this with was, ironically, the simplest bit of glass in this heavy lens that featured two thick symmetrical lens elements, another meniscus cemented to a spacer ring, and two more thick metal spacer rings. Liberated from their barrel, one lens turns into four:
The piece in the front — encased in a filter adapter so that I could mount it on a lensboard — is the little meniscus with which I took the above shot. It does seem a bit perverse that I would dismantle a perfectly good, sharp lens just to get at a meniscus with pronounced chromatic (and some spherical) distortions. Other photaku buy and take apart entire cameras (usually cheap vintage Kodak fixed-focus models) just for the ho-hum plebeian meniscus, as witnessed in the case of David Bardes who tore apart a Kodak 127-format camera for its meniscus and took this shot with it:
If you click on his photo and read the comments to it, you’ll see one from Jeff Damron that pretty such sums up the ironic choice of actively seeking out technologically inferior premodern lenses in these modern times (or perhaps we should say that this is an ironic choice for postmodern times): “a perfect example of aesthetic quality being more important that technical quality.” An aesthetic choice not dictated by technology determines our acts of literally stripping away layers of innovation and improvement to get back to an original core element — the lowly meniscus comes full crescent.
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