Test Driving the Enna 28: Dry Falls, North Carolina

[OlDoinyo]

I recently acquired an Enna 28/3.5 optic in the M42 mount. It is a classic-looking thing, all silver, and with very smooth mechanical action--it seems well-made; who knows how old the thing is?

 

Mounting it on the Sony A900, I put on the Baader filter. It is not a good idea to use a dichroic filter on such a wide-angle lens, but I do not yet possess anything more suitable, and I was eager to test the lens--so on yesterday's family outing to Dry Falls, I did just that. The strange name of the waterfall does not mean that it contains no water; rather, it refers to an eroded-out space behind the falls across which one can scamper without becoming completely drenched if the flow level is low or moderate; "dry" is a bit of a misnomer, and the space becomes hazardous if flow is high.

 

The first frame was exposed 5 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, giving the "milk-mist" appearance seen in many waterfall pictures. My usual color balance and workup protocol was used.I do not normally seek out this style, as it has become something of a visual cliche.

 

 

One is favorably impressed with the sharpness of the lens at f/22; there is little sign of diffraction softening, even at this small aperture. Contrast is good, with minimal veiling. It was necessary to shade the front of the lens, as it seems rather prone to flare from off-axis light sources (the sun was not far beyond the top of the frame.) The scene was virtually monochromatic and I left the display intent RGB.

 

I also made an attempt at a more realistic style, exposing 1/125 second at f/3.5 and ISO 6400. Shooting at ISO 6400 is also not a good idea--the dynamic range is degraded and there is so much color noise that the best I could salvage was a pseudo-sepia image, after a lot of Topaz DeNoise and killing the cyan and blue chrominance completely. Unfortunately, my Minolta film TLR has insufficient field of view to attempt a shot of this sort.

 

 

The lens is also quite soft wide open; whether from focus shift, CA, or other issues I cannot distinguish yet. The softening looks a bit worse than with the Steinheil 50, and sticking near minimum aperture might be a prudent strategy.

 

I conclude that this lens could be a very useful tool with the appropriate filter and with sufficient lighting. A 65-degree field of view is certainly nothing to sneeze at for a UV lens, though this may be irrelevant to those whose focus is primarily macrophotography. Hand-holding with this lens is likely to be a film-only proposition, however.

 

Update: the bandpass characteristics of this lens fall well short of expectations. This is described in a separate post.

[Andrea B.]

While this technique may sometimes be a "visual cliché", I was quite taken with your milk-mist falls and went "oooooh" when I first saw it. The UV-dark rocks and foliage give the smoothed falls an unexpected look.

 

And while the 2nd photo is perhaps degraded at ISO-6400, in the web-sized version this is not evident. This version has a old-fashioned appearance - not quite Pictorialist, but calling that to mind.