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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to photograph dreams? Not just the subjects of your everyday photos, but actual dreams—the fleeting, surreal moments that our minds conjure up while we sleep. That’s exactly what Glen Snyder sets out to explore in his photography essay Dreams (夢). Combining the art of photography with the subconscious mysteries of dreams, Snyder uses a unique tool for this endeavor: a Pentax 67 SMC 120mm f/3.5 Soft Lens. Through this lens, Snyder plays with light, focus, and depth to create an ethereal, dreamlike quality in his black-and-white images, tapping into the subconscious and testing the limits of photography.

But this project is more than just about technical finesse. It’s a visual exploration inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams, which left Snyder wondering whether dreams are best depicted in vivid color or moody black and white. As he captures glowing orbs and soft blooms in his photos, Snyder’s journey reminds us of the age-old question: are our dreams as clear-cut as we think, or do they blur, like the soft edges of his carefully selected lens?

Dreams (夢)

It is often helpful within one’s photographic practice to create a set of rules or challenges -- a dogme manifesto of sorts--by which to aspire towards results which may be different or unexpected. Creating a vintage film look in photography has been one such challenge for me, but there have been others which I have attempted (and where I feel I have achieved differing amounts of success or failure) such as: creating feelings of motion in a static image, creating a feeling of color using only black and white film, and creating a distorted view of reality by taking photos through reflections, and so forth.

One of my recent aspirations has been to photograph dreams….or at least to photograph something that conveys the feeling of dreams. This attempt is nothing original, as the subconscious element of dreams is something explored by the Surrealists roughly a century ago. Early cinematographers around that time and in the decades previous are said to have experienced their own work as something between dreams and reality, since their motion pictures provided some freedom to jump back and forth both in time and in location as if in a dream. These cinematographers used number of techniques to break from reality and to depict dream sequences, including as the use of slow motion, the use of wide-angle photography, and the use of camera lenses with unusual distortions.

In early photography, there were many lenses with flawed design which could render the chromatic aberrations required to create such dreamy effects. This was not a particularly sought-after look among most photographers, however. In response, the trend by manufacturers which continues to this day, is to create new lens designs with more and more optical elements and more and more elaborate lens coatings to eliminate chromatic aberration, flaring, optical distortions and so forth. As such, portrait photographers and street photographers today sometimes either resort to mist filters to take away some of the detail or they opt to do softening in digital post-processing.

In the 1970’s, there was a bit of a comeback in the dreamy-look, and camera manufacturers created a variety of soft-focus lenses. In this photo-essay, I try out one such lens to produce a dream-like effect: the Pentax 67 SMC 120mm f/3.5 Soft Lens.

The lens has several unusual features. It is limited to only 4 optical elements in 3 groups, which result in what can be strong spherical aberration. This results in a focused image which has sharp edges in the areas of high contrast but is coupled with soft blooming in areas of low contrast. The degree of softness of the image is controlled entirely by the aperture, such that above f/11 the softness disappears entirely, and the lens can be used just as a regular lens. On the other extreme, opening the aperture all the way to f/3.5 produces blooming that is so intense that the subject can be obscured or unrecognizable. I found that I got the best results around f/5.6 or f/8.

As for film selection, I decided to start with a slower black and white film, Ilford Delta 100. Slow, because I wanted to shoot with the aperture opened quite a bit. And black and white because….well, that is more complicated. A point of discussion when I was growing up was whether dreams were experienced in black and white or in color. As for most friends and for myself, the answer was black and white. Researchers in the early 1950’s had already confirmed that most people, when asked, say that they dream in black and white. The researchers also described the rare occurrence of “technicolor dreams” in a few of the study subjects. Jump forward to the 2000s and a follow-up study has revealed that those who have now grown up with color television often have dreams with some element of color. It also seems that for those of us who were exposed to black and white television in early childhood the effect is permanent, and even today we have the tendency to dream only in black and white.

I enlisted the help of friend and model Maya Akimoto to try to capture a dream-like black and white vintage look with the Pentax Soft lens.

Interestingly, I noticed that specular highlights at f/5.6 or lower produce glowing orbs rather than simple attractive circular bokeh. It’s an interesting effect, although I can’t recall having dreams that involve lots of glowing orbs. Perhaps my attempt a photographing dreams needs some work.

For those of you who dream in technicolor, I also provide two examples taken the same chilly spring day as the others but using Portra400. Being a faster film, the lens is stopped down more (to f/8), and the softness is more controlled.

Since the lens aperture controls softness, I can see how careful choice of film ISO is necessary with soft lenses to get the desired effect.

During the pandemic, I watched a lot of old films on television, mostly black and white. I also got out quite a bit to a park near my house where I took lots of photographs of flowers One afternoon, I got around to watching Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and was quite shocked that a true master in black and white cinematography would suddenly switch to the most vividly colored movie that I have experienced. Especially since the movie depicts dreams which, as we know, should be in black and white. As if the movie is not bright enough, many of the scenes are festooned with trees in full bloom, streams and meadows bursting with blossoms, and a good portion of this dream reality seems to be a large flower garland. Consisting of eight vignettes which are almost randomly arranged, the film truly embraces the spirit of early cinematographers who experienced their works as form of liberation from space and time, depicting this journey between life and death as something like a dream.

Since I took a lot of photos during the pandemic, and since flowers seem to play an important role in the film, I’ve wondered if my flower photography from a few years back is more dreamlike than my recent soft-focus lens attempts. For the following eight photos, I used vintage manual-focus prime lenses manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s. I often positioned myself as close as I could to the flowers depending on the minimum focal distance, and with the aperture either wide open or almost so. I found brightly lit mornings to be the best, as the light is directional and still not as strong as mid-day.

All of these are digital images and were taken with a Sony a7rII. For the first two, I used an Olympus G. Zuiko Auto-S 55mm f/1.2 lens.

The next two were shot with Olympus Zuiko Auto-T 135mm f/3.5 and Zuiko Auto-W 35mm f/2 lenses, respectively.

The next two were taken with a Canon FL 55mm f/1.2 lens.

Finally, I took the last two with a Minolta Auto Rokkor-PF 58mm f/1.8 lens.

All in all, I feel that my photographic pursuit of dreams still has a long way to go. The soft lens was interesting but requires a lot of work to control the soft effect. The flower photos I think portray the color-aspect of the dream world which aspires towards Kurosawa kind of experience. In the future, I think I will try to add some oddly random items to the photos to create more of a surreal effect. In any case, I hope this provides some interest and motivation to all of you who are also on a photographic journey in one way or another.

In what ways do external influences, such as watching films like Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, shape your approach to photographing dreams, and how do you incorporate such cinematic inspiration into your work? (Martin)

To be dreamlike, I feel that there should be some ambiguity so that the image creates a feeling as if maybe one is either revisiting a very distant memory or recalling the previous night's dream. In such a case, it is uncertain whether the event in the photograph happened at all or was simply a creation of the mind. Kurosawa's Dreams conveys this feeling through a series of unusual vignettes and while they convey great beauty, there may be some tension in the mind of the viewer who is trying to piece together a coherent plot which never quite emerges. In the making of the film, Kurosawa apparently felt no need to employ shallow depth of field bokeh or soft-lens techniques used by others to convey a dream state in the past, since the unusual scenes and dialogue of Dreams are both real and not real enough to be dreamlike.

How do you balance the challenge of capturing a dream-like atmosphere while still maintaining the technical quality of the images, particularly with the use of soft-focus lenses?

Using a soft-focus lens was a lot of fun, technically. Actually, before even trying it with film on my Pentax, I tested it out by adapting it to my digital camera so that I could get a feel for the soft-lens look. Maybe one misconception about soft-focus is that it is the same as "out of focus". In actuality, the subject should be in focus. Sometimes it is necessary to stop down to first get sharp focus, and then open the aperture to create the optical aberrations that comprise the soft-focus look. Also, the same rules of composition, lighting, leading-lines and so forth are still important when using a soft lens. Since the technique distorts the subject and the surroundings, it is important to keep the overall composition relatively simple.

Perhaps one of the shortcomings of my attempts to create dreams is that I have focused too much on the technical aspects. In future photos, I think I can improve by placing the subject in more dreamlike surroundings, or by juxtaposing different subjects which do not have any apparent relation other than in the photographic creation itself.

What impact has experimenting with different lenses and film types had on your understanding of how we perceive dreams through images?

Old lenses are still relatively inexpensive here in Japan, although much more expensive than a few years ago. I started using them on digital cameras about 6 years ago and, in the course of trying roughly 100 different lenses, I currently have my favorites. For example, I have a 135mm Canon FL lens which I find renders shades of green very vividly, while a 55mm Canon FL lens which I have renders out-of-focus areas quite beautifully like they were dipped in honey. And then I have a tiny Soviet Industar-50 lens that, with brightly lit backgrounds renders rainbow flaring throughout much of the photo. Each of these lenses could potentially provide a dream-like effect, depending on the subject and how the lens is used.

Regarding film, I admire the newer generation of photographers whose use of film is generally more experimental than those of us who started taking photos several decades ago. They are pushing and pulling film, using different film development procedures, trying multiple-exposure techniques, using expired film, using cinema film which is prone to halation and so forth. All of these techniques can potentially produce unusual dream-like images.

What dreams would actually look like were we able to photograph them is highly subjective. Even photographing how our eyes see light before our minds process it into images is something that would be difficult, let alone trying to show how the mind, devoid of light during a dream state, creates images that are not really there. Still, there is the mindset of some that the purpose of a photograph is to capture a moment of visual reality, so that it can provide a historial record in the future of what things really are in the present. This is and has been a more photojournalistic approach. I think as photographers, we have the ability to transcend this mindset and chose to create photographs which are an experience....dreamlike or not.....which is not bound just to the moment at which the photograph is taken. The approach is nothing new but, in a time in which camera and lens manufacturers tout sharpness and focus speed as paramount, it's important to consider possibilities beyond that.