This article will provide further reading for those interested in pursuing the subject further.
My primary reference for this series is the classic compendium Photographic Optics by Arthur Cox, who designed lenses for Taylor, Taylor, & Hobson (Leicester, UK) before moving to Bell & Howell (Chicago, USA). First published in 1943, this book was revised through the fifteenth edition in 1974. This is an essential book!
Historical information was taken from Rudolf Kingslake’s A History of the Photographic Lens, which is an entertaining read for camera obsessives. He provides biographical sketches for each of the main players, illustrating their relationships and collaborations.
There are any number of technical reference books for lens design. Of these Kingslake and Johnson 2010 and Sasián 2019 were consulted. Though I chose to keep the scope within my knowledge bounds! Optics soon gets into heavy mathematics, a field in which I am out of practice. So I will mention only one research article, by Jonas and Thorpe, since it contains intriguing information from the Leica camp.
Information on the Zeiss naming schemes was gleaned from the series of articles by Hubert Nasse. Unfortunately he never wrote the article on Sonnar. Further information has been gathered from individual lens sheets, Zeiss being particularly generous about providing these. If only other manufacturers shared information as an open and free resource!
Care should be taken in consulting any internet source since these are rife with errors, repeated from source to source without correction. Two lens databases are sometimes useful for determining details of consumer products: Sergei Borodin’s allphotolenses and Evgenii Artemov's lens-db. But even they will disagree on simple things like the lens formula.
For the sake of readability I have not included citations.
Works Referenced
Cox, Arthur. 1974. Photographic Optics: A Modern Approach to the Technique of Definition, fifteenth edition. London: Focal Press.
Jonas, Reginald P. and Michael D. Thorpe. 2006. “Double Gauss lens design: a review of some classics,” Proceedings of SPIE 6342, International Optical Design Conference 2006, doi: 10.1117/12.692187.
Kingslake, Rudolf. 1989. A History of the Photographic Lens. London: Academic Press.
Kingslake, Rudolf and R. Barry Johnson. 2010. Lens Design Fundamentals, second edition. Burlington, MA: Academic Press / SIE Press.
Sasián, José. 2019. Introduction to Lens Design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Zahorcak, Milan. 2007. “Evolution of the Photographic Lens in the 19th Century,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography: Digital Imaging, Theory and Applications, History, and Science, fourth edition, ed. Michael R. Peres. London: Focal Press, 157-76.
1 comment:
Apologies, I meant no disrespect. If your site was not useful I would not have included it here. I merely urge caution to anyone seeking information on the internet. Your site has its own limits, as you make clear on your FAQ page. For example, you do not record Chinese, Russian, or post-Soviet lenses. Those who assume your database is complete without having read that page will no doubt be misinformed.
Thank you for commenting and emphasising the research that you do, which is most certainly valuable!
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