レンズ 拾壱の沼
Spiratone Telephoto YS 135mm F1.8
巨大なレンズ（フィルター径82mm・外径96mm）超重量級(1.1kg)
前蓋はオリジナルではないVivitar製がついてきました
望遠135mmで明るいF1.8 をゲット(Soligor製 PKマウント）した後、eBayをブラブラ探索していて
似たようなごついレンズを見つけたのです。
同じSpiratone 135mm/1.8でも２種類あり、もう片方は by Mitake三竹光学製。
こちらは Sunサン光機らしいのです。
「YS」はどういう意味なのか調べると、YSマウントのことで、昔サンとシグマが使ったことのある
マウントですが現行製品では使われていません。
Tマウントと似た汎用マウントでNikon用だとかM42用アダプタを取り付けて使用するもので
ゲットしたSpiratoneはもちろんNikon用アダプタ側面に「YS-NI JAPAN」とあります。
カメラとレンズ合計で２ｋｇ超 あ〜屋外ロケでは無理です。
135mm f1.8 には他にもいろいろな製品があります。
Zeiss Sonnar
Soligor
シグマ
Polaris
Weltblick
Formula 5
Porst
まだあるかも
Spiratone (Wikipediaより)
Spiratone は低価格のレンズ・フィルター・照明機材・現像機材に特化した会社（商社）だった。
1941年にFred Spiraにより設立され、両親のアパートの浴室で現像を行っていた。
1946年にマンハッタン西27丁目のより広いロフトに移転し、それから数100万ドルの会社に成長した。
通信販売はQueens区Flushingの大きな倉庫で行われた。
Spiratoneは産業の革新者であり、日本の写真機材を米国に初めて輸入した会社である。
また、変わった機材・ユニークな機材を供給することでも知られ、例えば、既着色された白黒印画紙とか直角スパイレンズなど。
Herbert Kepplerによると、Spiratoneレンズは”しばしば有名メーカーの製品と同等以上だった”
有名な写真家Norman Rothschildは写真雑誌Popular Photographyに発表した写真でSpiratoneをよく使っていた。
会社は1950年代・60年代は成功していたが、次第に競争に負け、Spiraは1987年に退職し、会社は1990年に他の会社に吸収された。
Spira Collection (Wikipediaより)
Spiraは1960年代に写真史に関わる文書autographsを収集し始めます。
60年代末には歴史的カメラも収集し、それら収集品は米国の写真史学会を組織する発端ともなります。
Spira Collectionは20000点にも達し、他のcollectionでは見られないものも含まれます。
George Eastman Houseは1981年にSpira Collectionの中からユニークな品を選んで展覧会を開きました。
Spira Collectionの主要な部分はカタール政府に売られ、そこで建設される写真博物館で展示される予定でした。
残りの部分は2006年にウイーンのオークションで売られました。
2014年、カタール博物館は資金不足から職員解雇と国際メディア博物館建設中止を発表しました。
この発表以来、Spira Collectionの行方は不明です。
実は、次の文章を読むまではイタリアの写真用品商社だと思い込んでいましたが、米国の会社です。
この文章はSpiratoneの創業者が亡くなった記事が出たあと、遺族から名前の訂正を申し込まれたにも拘らず
新聞社が放置していて後日ようやく出した訂正記事だそうです。
Spiratone スピラトーネ と読んでいたのですが
スピラトーン が正解のようです。
元々はオーストリアのウィーンの生まれ、父の勤める銀行が世界恐慌で倒産し
一家はニューヨークに移住し、亡くなる2007年まで住み続けます。
Fred Spira, 83, Who Made Photo Gadgets Accessible, Dies
New York Times Sept.14, 2007
Fred Spira, a photo historian and collector of photographic gadgets who is credited
with helping standardize modern camera equipment and making it accessible to amateurs,
died Sept. 2 at his home in Whitestone, Queens. He was 83.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his son Jonathan said.
Mr. Spira was the owner of Spiratone, a photographic accessories business
that he started in 1941 as a film-development lab in the bathroom of his parents’ apartment in Manhattan.
By the late 1950s the company had grown into a multimillion-dollar business,
occupying a vast loft space on West 27th Street and a showroom on the ground floor.
It sold lenses, filters, lighting and darkroom equipment, but not cameras.
Because of his business success and his unremitting advocacy, Mr. Spira was able to persuade
major producers to standardize photographic accessories and to make them more affordable.
Amateur and professional photographers awaited each gadget catalog
as if they were children waiting for a Christmas toy catalog.
In a 1979 article in Popular Photography, John Durniak, a former photo editor
at Time magazine and The New York Times, wrote:
“Henry Ford did not invent the automobile and Fred Spira did not invent photography,
ヘンリー・フォードは自動車を発明したわけではないしフレッド・スピラが写真を発明したわけではない
yet both these men have had almost as much influence on their respective fields as the original inventors.
しかし２人共が元々の発明者以上に大きな影響を与えた
What Ford did to our economy and culture with the concepts behind the Model A and Model T,
フォードがA型やT型フォードで経済や文化に及ぼした影響と同様に
Spira has done to photography with his accessory lenses, close-up attachments and processing machines.”
スピラは交換レンズ・接写部品・現像機材で写真に大きな成果をもたらした。
Mr. Spira was responsible, Mr. Durniak wrote, for the widespread use of the fish-eye lens,
which can take a wide, hemispherical image; and for the proliferation of lenses
that can be switched from one camera to another.
He also got his system of interchangeable lens mounts accepted by makers in Japan, the United States and Russia.
In 2001, with his son Jonathan and Eaton S. Lothrop Jr., Mr. Spira (pronounced SPEE-rah) wrote
“The History of Photography as Seen Through the Spira Collection” (Aperture),
tracing the technological development of photography.
The study is based on Mr. Spira’s collection of about 10,000 books, articles and documents
written by or about prominent figures in photographic history ?
among them George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company;
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype, for which images were exposed
directly onto a mirror-polished surface;
and William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the positive-negative photographic process.
The collection also includes about 20,000 photographic devices, some of which were in use only briefly.
Many of those ephemeral devices, which experts refer to collectively as photographica, were used to illustrate the book.
Among the more fascinating examples:
¶One of the earliest photographic images, a daguerreotype of a country road, taken in 1840.
The image was unusual for its time because it captured an outdoor scene rather than a long-posed portrait of an individual.
¶A Praxinoscope, a coin-operated, table-top device from the 1880s that played tunes in time with rotating,
slightly varying images, giving the viewer a sense of motion.
¶An 1858 image of a clock salesman’s slotted traveling case, showing 16 clocks and their prices.
It is the first known instance of the use of photography as a selling tool.
¶A camera called a Pistolgraph, made by Thomas Skaife in the late 1850s, that looked like a pistol.
¶And of course the book includes photos of modern equipment, including the first digital camera model,
the Kodak DCS, which was introduced in 1991.
Siegfried Franz Spira was born in Vienna on Aug. 7, 1924, the only child of Hans and Paula Back Spira.
After emigrating to the United States, he changed his name to S. Franklin Spira, but he preferred to be called Fred.
Besides his son Jonathan, of Bayside, Queens, Mr. Spira is survived by his wife of 48 years,
the former Marilyn Hacker; and another son, Greg, of Kingston, N.Y.
Mr. Spira’s father, a Jew, had been a banker in Vienna.
When the bank failed in 1929, he and a Christian friend opened a camera store.
As the Nazis made inroads into Austrian politics even before they invaded,
14-year-old Siegfried Spira was barred from attending high school.
He began working in the camera store ? but only in the back, out of sight with his father.
In 1939 he boarded a Kindertransport, one of the trains that rescued Jewish children by taking them out of the country.
He was sent to England. Then, joined by his father in May 1940, he arrived in New York. His mother arrived later that year.
The small photo laboratory that Mr. Spira and his father ran out of their Manhattan apartment
was eventually ordered closed by the Fire Department.
It had become profitable thanks to word of mouth among Jewish immigrants on the West Side
and by advertisements in photo magazines.
In 1946 the Spiras opened their store on West 27th Street.
In the early 1950s Spiratone became one of the first photo-supply companies
to import Japanese accessories into the United States.
Mr. Spira retired in 1987, and the business, which by then had been acquired by another company, closed in 1990.
“There will always be some form of recording of light images,” Mr. Spira wrote in his book.
“What shape it will take in the future has yet to be determined.”Correction: May 19, 2008
An obituary on Sept. 14, 2007, about a photo historian and innovative dealer in photographic equipment
misspelled his surname at one point.
He was Fred Spira, not Shira.
It also misspelled his given name at birth and referred to him incorrectly
in recounting how he was barred from attending high school in Austria because his father was a Jew.
He was born in Vienna as Siegfried Franz Spira, not Sigfried, and was known in his youth as Siegfried, not Franz.
(After emigrating to the United States, he changed his name to S. Franklin Spira but preferred to be called Fred.).
Mr. Spira’s son Jonathan brought the errors to the attention of The Times last year and again last month;
this correction was delayed because editors and a reporter did not follow through on the complaint.
創業者Fred Spiraの収集品コレクションを紹介するサイト SPIRA.COM は表紙のみを残して
肝心のデータは失われています。
表紙に紹介のある書「The History of Photography as seen through the Spira Collection」をポチッとしてしまいました。
今や Spira Collection はこの本でしか見ることができません。