Several years ago now a retired co-worker came into my office with a giant lens, not like any I’d ever seen before. He handed it to me and explained it was an old TV camera lens. He asked if I wanted it, and despite not having any way of using it, I knew I had to have it, so I accepted his offer.
The lens, a Schneider Varigon 17-170mm from the 1960’s, sat on my shelf for while. I thought that I might use it for some Franken-camera made out of a cardboard box or something, but I told one of my brothers, who has a 3D printer, about it, and he started designing an adapter to mount it to my DSLR.
Once he got it done, the lens still sat for months. I knew before the adapter got finished that there was no way it could cover a full frame camera, as it was made for 16mm film, so I knew there would be vignetting. I also didn’t know (still don’t) the distance it needed in order for it to focus properly, so I had no idea what to really expect. When I got the lens in my hand and mounted it to my camera, it was a very pleasant surprise. There was heavy vignetting, especially at when the lens is zoomed any wider than about 150 mm, and if the exposure was set bright enough, some of the internals of the lens can be seen. I soon found that there’s a very narrow window in which things come into focus. Of course with a lens that old, predating any kind of dream about digital photography technology and what it would be capable of, the coatings on the glass are virtually nonexistent, and so the lens flares like crazy, and the sensor on my Nikon Z7 vastly out-resolves the resolution of the glass.
I brought the lens out with me on a few outings after I got the adapter, but nothing I was doing then really jived with the limitations that new piece of gear presented, and so I felt rather uninspired in what to do with it.
But then we bought our house, and as I spent hour after hour working there, and walking through the back yard with all the Ivy and Yucca and Roses and Virginia Creeper and grape vines, I knew that when I was done with all the renovations and had time to get the camera out again, that this lens would be exactly the tool to use to get to know our property.
I’ve had the lens out a few times in the past few weeks, and it’s been pretty fun to look at the backyard through that lens, literally, and metaphorically. That yard is so rich with vegetation that between the lens-based work I can mine from it and the lumens I have in mind to begin, I think I’ll never exhaust this place of its photographic potential.
