royfisher

Nikkor 55/3.5 on Nikon D200

D200

Nikkor 55/3.5 AI on Fuji S5

Dried mud, open shade (color by Kodachrome)

I think you probably didn't bother to understand what I was saying before your knee started jerking. I do not see how all of these things can be true: The prints were very sharp They'll all resolve the grain on a medium speed film without difficulty the Rodagon made the grain disappear One of them is not like the others. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but I am guessing it's intended to be some sort of ad hominem. Not sure, either, what warranted that kind of response, but there you go (again).

I once bought a secondhand enlarger that came with an El-Omegar. I think it was supplied as a "kit lens" as part of the original package. I only used it a few times; my recollection is that it would have been OK as a starter lens. I did, too, back when I did film. I always thought it was standard procedure, as well as just plain common sense.

Thanks for going into that. There's a lot of information there. Another attempt to describe what I was seeing: Comparing the Rodagon to my Componon was not unlike comparing same-size prints made from 4x5 and 35mm negatives. I'm not especially referring to resolution here, but to differences in subtlety and tonality. It is, of course, possible my Componon was a dud, but I don't think so. I went through several small-format lenses before the Rodagon. It was the standout. I'll recommend one for enlarging, too! One thing I like about Adams's book series (and pretty much anything where he's mostly unfiltered) is that he throws off a huge amount of interesting/useful extra information about all sorts of things. I prefer the ~1948 edition to the 1980s edition for that reason. I think I recall that in his later years his much-favored 8x10 enlarging lens was an Apo-Nikkor.

Probably not as difficult as it is to describe! Those are the best words I could think of without writing an essay. But it's there, and visible in both color and black and white. It's possible that the design tradeoffs were better suited to the types of things I did, but I have no numbers, sorry. Enlarger alignment is a non-issue, film pop is rather obvious and inconsistent. I seem to recall that you have a fondness for the 80/5.6 Rodagon. Would you elaborate on that preference, may I ask, if enlarging lenses are all the same?

Catch up on my reading.

A bit of an aside, but here's a screenshot of a Zone System advocate making an exposure reading using a spot meter. That's a diffuser he's holding in front of the meter. The context is that he is demonstrating composition, not the Zone System, and is exposing Polaroid; any errors would have been easily corrected by the process now known as "chimping." From Ansel Adams: Photographer (1981), a PBS documentary (recorded on VHS back when it first aired).

Me, too. The prints were very sharp and had a sort of relaxed, effortless look. Mine is an 80/f4.

"Open the film pod door, COL."

In Camera and Lens, page 98 of the 1948 edition (revised 1976) (if I may be so brash as to make a book recommendation), Adams says: "[A]s the smallest stops are used, the critical definition on the focal plane may be reduced due to diffraction effects, but the effect of approximate good definition over a considerable depth of field is one of all-over sharpness and clarity." The trade-offs between the sharpest apertures and usable apertures (depth of field) vary from lens to lens. For a given lens opening, the f-numbers that apply to longer lenses (such as used with large format cameras) are larger than those of shorter lenses. Scaling Adams's examples from page 95, for a "normal" 4x5 lens of 150mm, the lens opening for f/64 would be about 2.34mm in diameter. For a 50mm lens ("normal" for a 35mm camera or full-frame digital), a 2.34mm opening corresponds to f/21.3; f/64 would be an opening of 0.78mm.

jpalmer57, Thanks!

Roadrunner Rock It's actually some packing material from a toner cartridge box.

In Camera and Lens, page 26 of the revised 1948 edition, Adams says it was 1/2 second at f/16 on Panatomic-X. My recollection is that the name "f/64" was symbolic, to differentiate them from the fuzzy, everything-out-of-focus pictorialist approach.

Way back when it was gasoline that was so scarce that on most days you couldn't find any, I tended to stay at home when I could, because if I ran out I would have to push my truck five miles uphill in the snow. Anyway, I got to wondering what a large format lens would look like on 35mm film, and found that my OM-2N was thin enough it could be sandwiched onto the back of a Calumet view camera. Using the Calumet as a bellows, I tried a 135mm Symmar-S, with tilt and swing to get the texture in focus. The lighting was a small flash, manually triggered. The images turned out to be considerably underexposed, though, hence the abundance of scanner noise. The lens wasn't as sharp as a Zuiko, but it made pretty tolerable 8x10 prints. Shot on Kodachrome 25. Artificial, 1979.