Society of Camera Operators 2016 Announces Distinguished Service Lifetime Achievement Award

Los Angeles, CA (December 16, 2015) — The Society of Camera Operators (SOC) today announces recipients of its 2016 Service Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Steven Manios Sr., former owner and president of Century Precision Optics, will receive the Distinguished Service Lifetime Achievement Award for his groundbreaking work in camera optics.

Steve Manios was born on September 4th 1938 in Athens Greece. He and his twin brother were oldest boys in a family of seven brothers and sisters.  The family survived the great famine of 1941/42 where over 300,000 residents of Athens and the surrounding area died. Medical problems prevented his father from working so at the age of 12 he left school to work as a plumber in order to support his family. He left Greece in 1957 at the age of 19 and traveled to Los Angeles California to work as an apprentice for a friend of the family. This friend was Chris Condon the owner of Century Photo Supplies (later to become Century Precision Optics).  It was hard starting out and he even slept on a small cot in the back of the machine shop in the beginning.

By 1960 Steve completed his apprenticeship with Chris and gradually started working his way up through the company.   He took advantage of what was offered to him and never looked back. He worked so many hours for Century that Chris Condon rewarded him by allowing him to earn equity in the company.  In 1973 Steve borrowed the money to purchase a controlling interest in Century.

During the 70’s Century and Steve Manios became well known for their Tele-Athenar telephoto lenses. They were industry standards for action sport and wildlife photographers and film makers. These lenses were used on many films such as Bruce Brown’s “Endless Summer’ and Marty Stouffer’s TV Show “Wild America”.  Jack Lord and Steve became good friends after Jack personally purchased lenses for use on his TV Series “Hawaii Five O”

Steve was also involved in the development of extreme wide angle lenses for 16mm cameras. The two popular lenses were a 3.5mm and 1.9mm for action sports and POV shooting. These lenses were also popular with the underwater shooters including Al Giddings.

Also during the 70’s Century started working closely with the US Military and the auto industry designing and manufacturing Hi G ruggedized lenses that would be mounted on tanks and even rockets being shot at missiles. In the auto industry the lenses were used for crash testing evaluating seat belts and other safety measures.  It was exciting to see the optics being used for highly classified testing and to find out much later that it was for the Patriot anti-missile system.

It was During the 70’s Century started to become know for making custom optics. They designed and built a relay system for Industrial Light and Magic that George Lucas used for some of the model sequences in the first “Star Wars” movie.

As the 1980’s rolled around, under Steve Manios, Century evolved into a company that would gain a reputation worldwide for designing and improving the way scenes could shot through the lens. Working closely with rental house owners like Denny and Terry Clairmont as well as Otto Nemenz and others; Century introduced the Century Periscope and the Super Wide Low Angle Prism.

Cinematographers like Haskell Wexler, Vilmos Zsigmond, and Bill Bennett, visiting the office. Linwood Dunn always seemed to be stopping by needing something for the special project he was working on at the time.  One day a young filmmaker Mark Centkowski stopped by needing to adapt an endoscope to a video camera for a special project.  Steve Manios was awarded a US Patent for the resulting Innovision Probe system.

As video began replacing film for TV newsgathering in the early 1980’s, Steve Manios realized new products would be needed for Century to survive and grow. Steve created some of the first of the first wide angle adapters for video lenses.

The company really hit another home run when Canon and Nikon introduced their high speed telephoto lenses by modifying these lenses for film cameras.
Then when the Canon 150-600 zoom lens was introduced in 1984, Steve put together a design team and modified the first one for sports and wildlife as a variable focus film lens. Century then begin the extremely difficult task of turning the Canon 150-600 into a true zoom lens for professional filmmaking with follow focus and zoom gears and most importantly a stable image that remained in focus as the lens was zoomed.  This resulted in Century winning a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1992.

In the 1980’s Century became the USA distributor of Angenieux motion picture lenses.   There had always been a relationship between Steve Manios and Angenieux. In the 70’s Century used to optimize the 12-120 for the television film crews.  During the 80’s Steve and Century worked closely with Angenieux on the development of their new lenses including the 25-250 HR which would become an industry standard.

As the 1990’s rolled around Century kept up with the times. They created a full line of high quality optics for the new age of MiniDV cameras. Steve sold the business to Tinsley Laboratories in 1993. He was on their board of directors and remained active in the company until 1998.

Around 2004 Steve Manios had an idea for a new high quality, wide angle, short zoom lens that he felt was needed for hand held and Steadicam work in the movies. He approached his friends at Angenieux with his concept and funded the design and initial manufacture of what became widely popular Angenieux 15-40 T2.6 Optimo zoom lens. This lens then became the first in Angeniex’s award winning Optimo and DP Series of zoom lenses.