Lenses for Analog Professional Photography

Even in the age of digital photography, the professional camera remains the dominant tool for advertising, still-life and architectural photographs. The large formats of conventional photography still offer unsurpassed sharpness and an incomparable abundance of detail. Professional cameras allow perspective corrections and deliberate inclinations of the plane of best sharpness (Scheimpflug plane) which is not possible with nonadjustable cameras or – when using shift or perspective control lenses – only with great restrictions.

Rodenstock’s range of lenses for professional photography therefore includes different lens types which are available in graduated focal lengths to meet practical requirements.

• The standard lens for conventional professional photography should provide a medium to large image angle, high speed and best image quality. These demands are met by the Apo-Sironar available in the two versions N and S. As a standard lens, it is used with a focal length which roughly corresponds to the diagonal of the format.

• For large image scales from around 1:5 to 2:1, there is the special close-up lens Apo-Macro-Sironar. It is characterized by excellent definition in this scale range as well as by high speed and a wide image circle.

• Whenever small rooms, wide spaces or short taking distances (architecture) make large field angles necessary, the wide-angle lenses of first choice are the Apo-Grandagon and the Grandagon-N with field angles of up to 120°.

• When the large movement range of the ultra-wide angle lenses Apo-Grandagon and Grandagon-N is utilized, the physically unavoidable fall-off in illumination to the margin of the image circle can generally be reduced by a Rodenstock center filter which is available in the same high quality as our lenses and with vignetting-free mounts.

• In order to be able to use our high-performance lenses with cameras without bellows like panoramic or shift cameras, we developed our non-rotating focusing device “Focus-Mount”. It is available with distance scales precisely matched to any focal length of all Rodenstock lenses in shutter size 0.