Creamy FOREground blur?

After a bit of luck, the farewell bid to two of my favourite EF and EF-S lenses, and some additional cash, I acquired myself a 34-year-old f/2 90 mm Leitz Canada Summicron lens. It's not in perfect shape, but it's good enough to have me believe that the previous owner, or owners, have seldom used it. After all, 90 mm is not terribly useful in general photography, but it sure makes trains look nice (so yeah, weirdos like me might find it useful).

After nicely forcing a friend of mine into doing some pro bono modeling work, this lens, at f/2, wow. But that's not the point of this post. This lens is supposed to be nice for portraits. I'd be more surprised (feeling cheated, and perhaps devastated) if it wasn't. What I really wanted to do, was to point it at some trains. Crank the focus ring to infinity and off I went, to some random S-Bahn stations I deemed suitable on the map.

The last mark on the focus scale before infinity is at 50 ft., or 15 m., it may just work out, given the narrow field of view it has. The weather was the typical cloudy affair (when it's not rainy), but it helped with this little experiment, for the most part. I was using the fastest of shutter speeds this camera could physically give me without any filters. Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? (I probably have straightened and cropped some of these pictures, but not in any significant way, i.e., they are pretty close to full-crop).

This is one of the first attempts. The TGV was going away, and I jumped the gun just a tad, and the nose is noticeably soft. I like the blurred look of this patch of grass between the tracks. This is at Düsseldorf-Reisholz.

An IC coming towards me, and the nose is just on the verge of beginning to become soft.

This lens is not easy to focus with a rangefinder. It looked fine through the viewfinder, but in fact, the nose of this Austrian Taurus was out of focus. My internal tape measure needs some tuning that's for sure. The location has changed to Düsseldorf-Volksgarten.

Closed in on the locomotive, and tried my best to refocus the shot. Turned out pretty well, if you ask me.

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