The Zoom by Luis Oliveros

My father was born in Spain in 1910. He came from a large family of thirteen children. His father died while he was still very young, and his mother, a working widow, could not afford to finance the education of all her children. Only through great sacrifice were one or two of the older brothers able to complete university degrees, one of them becoming an engineer. My father, who was passionate about engineering, could only pursue a shorter engineering qualification. Some of his sisters also completed shorter courses. One could say they were all good examples of what determination and hard work can achieve, both before and after the Spanish Civil War.

My father had the mind of an engineer. As much as circumstances allowed, he loved technology, mathematics and Bach. He bought a camera, then another, and another (like me). I have seen many of his photographs: little black-and-white images of cars, buildings and family portraits. The best of his cameras was a Voigtländer Bessamatic, for which he owned the typical lenses available at the time (35, 50, 135 and 200 mm). Then, one day in the 1960s, he bought a zoom lens. At the time, neither he nor I could have imagined that, more than half a century later, I would still be using that same lens.

A zoom in photography is a lens that enables you to change the focal length you are using without having to change the lens itself; it is a lens with more than one focal length. The optics of the lens enable you to go from a wide focal length (where you can include many items in your frame) to a longer one that is more selective, excluding many of the items that were included in the wider frame and directing your attention to fewer subjects, perhaps only one.

Although the film industry had been experimenting with zoom lenses as early as 1929, the first zoom lens for still cameras was the Voigtländer Zoomar 36-82 mm f/2.8, made for and commercialised by Voigtländer in 1959. Although Voigtländer originated in Austria in 1756, it moved its headquarters from Vienna to Braunschweig, Germany, in 1862 (another date often quoted is 1868, referring to the legal transfer). This lens was made for the largest camera Voigtländer was producing at the time, the Bessamatic.

Coincidentally, Nikon introduced the first Japanese mass-produced zoom lens for 35 mm cameras in November 1959, the Telephoto-Zoom Auto 85-250 mm f/4-4.5. This Nikon zoom lens was much bigger and heavier than the Zoomar, and probably more complicated too, with its variable maximum aperture and much longer focal-length range. Introduced in November 1959, it took almost ten years before a second version appeared on the market. I have never seen this Nikon zoom lens. However, I bought my first Nikon camera in 1980—and many more since then.

Some thirty-five years later, when digital mirrorless cameras became popular (Leica, of course, has always been a mirrorless camera since 1925), old lenses made for film cameras could be adapted much more easily to modern digital cameras. Adapters were eventually made for all types of cameras, including Nikon mirrorless cameras, and for all kinds of lenses with different mounts, including the so-called Deckel (DKL or Bajonett) mount used by Voigtländer and other brands in the 1950s.

It is worth noting that, unlike Sony (and, soon afterwards, Canon), which realised early that the future belonged to mirrorless cameras, Nikon was the last of the major manufacturers to move into that field, paying a very heavy price for the delay. It came late, but it came, and I immediately moved from the traditional Nikon F mount to the new Z mount mirrorless cameras. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake, as the first models were still far from having a well-developed autofocus system. After a five-year search for the right adapter that would allow me to use my father’s Voigtländer lenses on my Nikon cameras, I finally found one that worked. It enabled me to use the lenses I had been keeping for so many years, including that first zoom lens.

I wrote, some time ago, an article on vintage lenses. They are not necessarily better than modern ones; on the contrary, they simply have their own character. Perhaps their greatest attraction for me lies in the process of taking the photograph itself, combining old technology with new: a 50-year-old optical lens on a 2025 camera. Of course, they are not autofocus lenses, but even that has an obvious appeal. Leica has survived and become what it is with manual-focus cameras.

At any rate, my greatest satisfaction in using these lenses is being able to say that I took these photographs with my father’s lens—in this case, the Zoomar, the first zoom lens for still photography—mounted on a Nikon D750, itself now approaching vintage status. Although I bought it a little more than a year ago for very little money, the Nikon D750 was introduced in 2014. As you can see, both lens and camera are still working very well.