50 years of light: Meyer 50mm f/1.8 under the evening sun and the bokeh bubble surprise
The afternoon started quietly. I had been sitting on the balcony with my Sony Alpha 7R—adapted with a 1970s East German Meyer-Optik Görlitz Oreston 50mm f/1.8—since about fifteen hundred UTC, hoping to catch some late spring golden hour backlight. But the sky remained dull, offering nothing but a sterile, flat reflection off the distant highway overpass. I nearly packed up at sixteen thirty.
Then, around seventeen twenty, the cloud cover cracked open just a sliver. The setting sun cut through at a near-horizontal angle, hitting the neighbor's hydrangea bushes right below. I immediately cranked the counter-clockwise focus ring, which still feels a bit stiff.
The Meyer lens is delightfully flawed when shot wide open. Due to the limited low-dispersion glass and coating technology of its era, strong backlight induces a slow, blooming flare with a distinct warm, golden tint. More importantly, the background specular highlights under the harsh rim-light produced those signature "soap-bubble" bokeh rings. This visual artifact, caused by under-corrected spherical aberration, is exactly what modern G Master or L-series lenses spend millions on computer algorithms to eliminate—yet it is precisely where the romance of manual glass lies. The peak light lasted for about fifteen minutes before the sun dropped below the horizon, resetting the frame to a cold, clinical digital sharpness.
I checked the roll of Era 100 black-and-white film I developed later tonight. Under the same harsh backlighting, the silver halide grains held up impressively against the extreme contrast—no blown-out dead whites in the highlights, and plenty of texture retained in the shadows of the hydrangea leaves. It proves once again that wrestling with chemical development and manual focus still yields an irreplaceable texture in this digital age.