Softar Softar catchee glamour

Softar Softar catchee glamour

A casual remark to Dave (mistere) about my Softar soft focus filter started this off. It appears that I haven’t (hadn’t) told Dave about my best-value accessory ever. £33 from Jessops in around 1980, and it’s been with me ever since.

Now, there are a lot of soft focus filters around, and most of them are unpredictable, give varying effects depending on the aperture, and destroy image resolution. Essentially, you pay good money for a sharp lens, then add a filter that gives you the effect of having a much cheaper lens.



Not so with the Softar, which was made in three grades, I, II, and III. Mine’s a 67mm Softar III, the strongest of the range. Made by Zeiss, and most commonly sold for Hasselblads, but they were also available for Contax lenses, and for some Rollei models. There are quite a few on eBay.

The thing that set the Softar apart was that instead of having an overall uneven surface, it’s optically flat, but with a series of small convex lenses on the front surface. This means that there is a sharp central image, and a diffused halo around it. In practice, this is only visible around light subjects, as in my main gallery post last Friday: if you use a Softar below the enlarger lens in the darkroom, you get the opposite effect, with shadows bleeding into the highlights for a sinister look.



The B+W soft focus filter gave a similar effect, achieved with a pattern of rings around the lens, like the ripples on a pond, though the current Schneider Kreuznach website shows something that looks remarkably like the Softar pattern. I’ve also got a Hoya soft focus filter using much the same pattern, and that’s the one I used for the picture below. It proved surprisingly difficult to get an image that shows the pattern: in the end, a non-portrait, showing the shadow the filter casts gives the clearest idea of what it’s like.



Of course, Gaussian blur, yabber yabber: but that wasn’t around in 1980. And, even today, there’s a charm to any accessory where you can see what it’s doing through the viewfinder, and don’t have to process extensively to get the results…