Sunday 11 July 2010

Mini Lens Tests Blue: Auto Chinon 55mm f/1.4 I

This is the latest in a series of articles about very old lenses from before the dawn of time (the 1970s). This one is an Auto Chinon 55mm f/1.4. Mine was made by a company called Tomioka. I will include cold hard facts in the next post, but for now I am bored with the convention whereby I post sample images from the corners, at a variety of apertures. Too linear, too Western, too up-tight. I want to make all that has gone before seem pale and empty. The world that follows may not acknowledge me as its creator, but it will be my creation nonetheless.

And so here is an impressionistic portrait of the lens, shot mostly at f/1.4, accompanied with M-Tron, the super Mellotron emulator, which I pumped whilst feeding it through the filters of a Korg MS-20:


Auto Chinon 55mm f/1.4: MOTHER COUNTRY LOVE HATE
Canon 5D MkII


That's what the bokeh looks like. There are things that the human mind cannot grasp, and yet they exist. One day the collective consciousness of humanity will encounter an immovable object, and we will not have been so unstoppable after all.

It has a 52mm filter thread. I like it, and in a subsequent post I will show you why. Not today.