Hands On: Lomography's Throwback Nour Triplet V Bokeh Control Lens
Lomography often looks back to the early days of photography for its steampunk-styled art lenses. Its latest, the Nour Triplet V 2.0/64 Bokeh Control Art Lens, follows suit, and is available for order today via Kickstarter. The all-manual lens looks like something out of the 19th century on the surface. Inside its optics leverage spherical aberration control to produce three distinct looks from a single lens. It's an intriguing concept, and another entry in a chorus of off-kilter lenses that give photogs a reason to give up modern conveniences like autofocus, for snapshots that you just won't get with lenses that strive for technical perfection.
The lens design team at Lomography looked far back into history to get the idea for the Nour Triplet V, speficially to Egypt in the early years of the second millennium. A relatively obscure scientist and optician, Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, studied light passing through a pinhole camera obscura and noted differences in the image caused by the shape and size of the opening. This led to the observation of spherical aberration (SA), the effect where light passing through the edges of an optic scatters, rather than converging on a central point. In a nod to al-Haytham, the Nour name is Arabic in origin, and signifies light. It's an appropriate choice or a lens.
The Triplet V section of the moniker refers to the Nour's optical formula. It's a 5-element/3- group, inspired by the original Cooke Triplet, a late 19th century formula that was the first to effectively suppress SA. But with the Nour, the position of the middle group is flexible, not fixed. Shifting its position influences the look of photos, especially defocused backgrounds. A 64mm focal length and maximum f/2 aperture are a
Read more on pcmag.com
