''Dollonds'' Lens?

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Kieron
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Hey :)

I picked up a cheap lens today for a couple of quid from a car boot sale, it's a 28mm 2.8 branded as 'Dollonds-S' was just wondering if anyone could shed any light on it at all as I've never heard of them? I bought it as I wanted a 28mm so I could reverse it for macro, so for £2 it was a bit of a no brainer :)

Actually, as an after thought....A 28mm prime could come in handy. I'm guessing it'll only be manual focus though?

Oh and one more quickie while i've got your attention - There's what seems to be 2 aperture rings, one turns smoothly and opens/closes the blades but the other just seems to make hell of a 'clunk' and doesn't seem to do much else? :thinking:

Thanks for listening to my rambling :D
 
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Hi, These lenses were made by several manufacturers mainly Tokina for a chain of photographic shops called "Dolland & Newcombe" back in the very late 60s early 70s. The optical quality of these lenses did very a bit, some were dreadful while others returned an acceptibly good performans.

The lens you have is almost certainly a pre select lens. One ring will have click stops to pre select an aperture before focussing the lens. After focussing the lens manually at full aperture you would then use the other ring to close the aperture to the pre selected setting quickly before taking your picture.

More often than not SLR cameras of that time were not equipped with TTL metering so any metering would have been done with a seperate hand held meter or an uncoupled meter mounted on the top of the pentaprism and then the settings applied to the camera manually.

If the camera did have TTL metering then it would have probably been stopped down metering, the lens would be stopped down to the taking aperture for metering the pre selected aperture applied to the lens, then the lens aperture opened with the ring without the click stops for focussing, and then stopped down to the pre selected aperture for taking the shot.

It sounds a bit complicated but after a bit of practice it all became second nature.

Hope this answers your question.
 
Hi, These lenses were made by several manufacturers mainly Tokina for a chain of photographic shops called "Dolland & Newcombe" back in the very late 60s early 70s. The optical quality of these lenses did very a bit, some were dreadful while others returned an acceptibly good performans.

The lens you have is almost certainly a pre select lens. One ring will have click stops to pre select an aperture before focussing the lens. After focussing the lens manually at full aperture you would then use the other ring to close the aperture to the pre selected setting quickly before taking your picture.

More often than not SLR cameras of that time were not equipped with TTL metering so any metering would have been done with a seperate hand held meter or an uncoupled meter mounted on the top of the pentaprism and then the settings applied to the camera manually.

If the camera did have TTL metering then it would have probably been stopped down metering, the lens would be stopped down to the taking aperture for metering the pre selected aperture applied to the lens, then the lens aperture opened with the ring without the click stops for focussing, and then stopped down to the pre selected aperture for taking the shot.

It sounds a bit complicated but after a bit of practice it all became second nature.

Hope this answers your question.

That's brilliant, thank you:thumbs:
 
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