Zeiss Sonnar 5cm/2 in LTM (pre-war) Photos

[raid]

Here are some photos taken with a Bessa T and a Zeiss Sonnar 5cm/2 in LTM. DAG recently added some shimming to the lens mount to make the focusing precise and accurate. Here is a link to some photos. I hope it is OK to have such postings on two websites. I am impressed by how good the old Sonnar is.

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=550788

[Brian Sweeney]

Very nice photo's. How did it do wide-open and close-up? That is where the J-3's give me fits.

I have the urge to do some lens mount changing. I'm overcome with the desire to put a Leitz lens on a Nikon RF camera. Swap the Collapsible Zeiss 5cm F2 with a Leica lens module. Think I'll start with a Summar... and a cheap one.

[Gabriel M.A.]

Not too shabby at all. Amazing how good it is indeed, also considering it's not coated and how it handled these high-key scenes.

[taffer]

Yep, I know it's hard to judge from web images but looks crisp to me and as Gabriel said, the color rendition is surprising for a lens that old.

[raid]

Very nice photo's. How did it do wide-open and close-up? That is where the J-3's give me fits.

I have the urge to do some lens mount changing. I'm overcome with the desire to put a Leitz lens on a Nikon RF camera. Swap the Collapsible Zeiss 5cm F2 with a Leica lens module. Think I'll start with a Summar... and a cheap one.

Brian: That's a good one. I got back four rolls of scanned film, and I compared the photos over and over to figure out which camera and lens combination was used for which roll. I was undecided between a Canon 80-200/4L and Canon 5cm/2 Sonnar. I am still undecided which lens was used, but there is also the possibility that I switched lenses and the 50mm shots are taken by the Sonnar. Oh well. Next time, I will write down which lenses were used. This, however, takes away the fun of just walking around and taking photos as they come.

[raid]

Looking again at the photos, I am now more confident that I did use the 5cm Sonnar lens. DAG told me from the start that optically the lens was very clean, but it needed some shimming. I used a lens hood with all photos.

[Brian Sweeney]

I tested SIX adjusted J-3's with two cameras on three rolls of film. Many notes with serial numbers were taken. And in the end I had to make some very fine adjustments on my Canon 7 RF used to adjust the lenses.

[raid]

Brian: I would also take notes if I had a sensitive task like yours, where you add specific shimmings to a specific lens based on its shortcomings. I may next time take along only one lens and take a whole roll of film at various lens settings (wide open, close up, ...).