Darrell Owens with an aerial reconnaissance camera from the Vietnam War era and holding the 1956 Leica/Leitz lens he pulled from it and refurbished for use with his Fujifilm medium format camera. (Karen Kraco)
Photographer and Sheridan resident Darrell Owens has taken optical tools of war and transformed them into instruments to promote peace and culture.
Owens not only makes photographs, but he also makes the lenses that make those photographs, adapting the glass from sources that range from architectural tools to aerial reconnaissance cameras. Sometimes, the source of the lens he uses for an assignment has special significance, such as the origin of a lens that will travel with him to Europe this summer.
He’ll be accompanying educators led by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas to document their visit to historically significant sites in Europe, including Auschwitz. The 1956 camera Owens used for the glass for this particular lens was used for post-bombing surveys during the Vietnam War. It was made by Leitz — the German company that rebranded as Leica.
Ernst Leitz II, the company’s head during World War II, saved Jewish employees from the Nazis by assigning them to positions in other European countries, eventually sending refugees to the Manhattan office of the company, giving them a stipend until they could find a job. The “Leica Freedom Train,” as it’s called by historians, saved the lives of several hundred Jews and continued until Germany closed its borders.
Owens said his task in Europe will be “to capture in photos the emotional experience these educators are having along the way, so they can come back and tell their story and create an interest and a deeper understanding in their students.” He said the only thing that stresses him out about his photography work these days is choosing the right lens for an assignment, and he was thrilled to have a lens so suitable for the trip. “It seemed like of all jobs, this would be one where lens choice could hold some significant significance.”
Owens has plenty of interesting lenses to choose from. He’s been a photographer since high school, but since the pandemic, he’s been refurbishing and reconstructing vintage camera lenses from unusual sources and building new lenses from sources that were never intended to be coupled with a camera.
His passion for reworking optics was spurred by a friend who, for years, had been urging him to try using vintage lenses. Owens only had modern, autofocus lenses — lenses that automatically focus, with the press of a button, on whatever you point them at. “I didn’t understand all of the nuance that comes with an old lens,” Owens said. “Why would I get something that I have to focus myself? When I had used my autofocus lenses in manual mode, they weren’t very forgiving, you know. One little turn and you’re on the other side of the street,” he explained.
He found a $60 Takumar lens on Etsy — made by the Japanese company Asahi and the same lens that several of the Beatles used to carry around in Pentax SLR cameras. Then he looked for an adapter for it. Owens said there’s an adapter for most lenses people use with film cameras. “All the adapters really do is get you the right distance between the lens and the film” (or the right distance from the sensor on digital cameras.) The Takumar was his introduction to the sharp focus and manual focusing control possible with old lenses. He was hooked.
He started reading about vintage lenses, watching YouTube videos and keeping a wish list. He learned that his initial perception that buying old lenses would be a cheap experience was wrong. “You get what you pay for, and there’s a lot of things that can be wrong with them.” He learned about a lens fungus that grows on the surface of lenses and secretes hydrofluoric acid, etching the glass. And that good older lenses are radioactive, due to thorium in the glass formulation. The thorium increases light transmission, but it also turns the glass yellow or orange as it decays. Fortunately, as Owens also learned, the lens can be restored to crystal quality by exposing it to UV light.
During the pandemic, he began crafting his own lenses, getting tips from more YouTube videos, including some on watchmaking, which requires similar skills in taking apart and putting back together components.
The original serial number on the brass casing of the lens Owens adapted from the gunsight of a 1944 Sherman tank. (Karen Kraco)
In addition to the 1956 aerial reconnaissance lens, the sources of his glass include an East German-made large-format enlarger from the ’60s; the gunsight from a 1944 Sherman tank, a P-2 aircraft strike attack camera, used for recording the impact of air attacks; a Kern 16 mm cinematic movie camera; and a 1950s Soviet-made Zenit Helios lens, prized for its swirly bokeh and used in shooting “Dune: Part Two.” (Bokeh is the soft, background blur patterns behind the subject when a photographer shoots with a narrow depth of field.)
Making a usable lens from such sources requires a lot of problem solving and precision, which Owens relishes. For example, with the movie camera, he needed to figure out how to make an image larger than the 16 mm film it was designed for. The Sherman tank gunsight, the optical piece near the cannon that soldiers used to visualize their target, sat around his house for several years after he found that he couldn’t use the eyepiece, until he thought to peer inside and saw internal glass. He accessed that, but reached a dead end when that glass didn’t create a camera-useable image. Another year or so passed before he picked it up again. In the end, he took a chance and wound up sawing, close to the lens, through its tube casing in order to shorten the brass piece to get the proper distance from the back of the camera.
In constructing new lenses with old glass, Owens uses some stock pieces, such as helicoids — extension tubes that help achieve the proper distances. But he also adds unique touches, like painting the insides of his lenses with a recently developed super-black paint, which increases sharpness and contrast, controlling the bouncing around of light. “I can actually get more out of this lens than what even normally would have been possible.”
Most of Owens’ professional work involves photographing professional and community classical music groups, including the Minnesota Orchestra, orchestral and band groups at University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Symphonic Winds. As he began accumulating vintage lenses, he began favoring them at shoots over his autofocus ones. As he started perfecting his manual focusing techniques, he found he preferred them to letting the camera focus. The manual focus allows him to precisely tune his focus — the bridge of a violin, the eyelashes of a musician he’s photographing from the side. An autofocusing camera would not easily hone in on those details. With his new skills, he tried using his autofocus lenses with a manual focus setting on the camera. “I was missing every shot,” he said. So he sold all his autofocus lenses. “That was a leap of faith, and it’s a little unheard of for the type of photography I do,” he said.
That leap of faith was accompanied by adjustments in his approach to compensate for the slower focusing time involved in manual focusing. He’s learned to anticipate movements and focus on where a musician or conductor’s movements will position them a few seconds later rather than focus on where they are in the moment. He also synchronizes his movement with the repetitive ones of the musicians. He described how he sways back and forth with the motion of a string player. “Rather than me trying to change the focus, I start to match them. And so it really feels almost like a little dance happening … Sometimes I wonder what the musicians think, because they’re used to a person just standing there and pressing a button.”
For Owens much of the joy in creating new lenses is in putting them to use. “I don’t just use these for fun. I use these on my paid gigs,” he said. He was thrilled, as were his clients, to use a 1956 lens in a wedding shoot that included the couple driving around in a 1956 Chevy Bel Air restored by the bride’s father, who had recently passed away. Owens also appreciates the history of his finds and loves giving them a second life. “For me, there’s an excitement that comes out of the fact that these were made before I was born, yet I can use it for work.”