Zeiss Planar 0,7/50mm “Stanley Kubrick”

This famous lens is one of the fastest lenses ever made, with an incredible maximal aperture of ƒ0.7, it was about two stops faster than the available lenses at that time., developed by Carl Zeiss for the “NASA” lunar program.

A few years later, the famous cinematographer Stanley Kubrick decided to use three of these lenses to film Barry Lyndon. This lens's unique properties allowed to film some of the most iconic visuals known in cinematography, lit only by candlelight and shot using Planar ƒ0.7 lenses on a modified Michell camera. Barry Lyndon won the 1976 Oscar for cinematography.

In the 1960s, NASA commissioned Carl Zeiss to develop a set of extremely large aperture lenses to capture images of the dark side of the moon in its Apollo missions. The company ended up creating 10 Carl Zeiss ƒ0.7 lenses. Six were sold to NASA, one was kept by Carl Zeiss, and three of them were sold to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

According to Dr. H. Nasse, chief optical designer at Zeiss, it is practically impossible to adapt this “dream lens” to an SLR camera body. It had an image circle diameter of 27mm, making it almost an APS-C lens, the lens weights 1850 grams, body diameter is close to 90mm. Due to its optical design, the lens needs to be positioned very close to the film plane: the distance to the last lens vertex is only 5.3mm!

In 2011, the lens with serial number 2583362 was auctioned off at the WestLicht Photographica Auction for 90,000 euros.

Ten years later, on 12 June 2021, the lens with serial number 2584563 will be auctioned at the Leitz Photographica Auction with a start price of € 50.000 and € 100000–120000 estimate.

Photo credit: © WestLicht Photographica Auction

References

1. H. H. Nasse, “From the Series of Articles on Lens Names: Planar – ZEISS” – lenspire.zeiss.com
2. Leitz Photographica Auction – www.leitz-auction.com