Vintage 4X5 Lens Experiments

Before Christmas I picked up a 117mm Kodak lens off an old 2A (or similar) folding camera. It covers (with little extra room) a 4X5 negative. Here are my first test images.



Here was my first test shot. The lens is a bit lower contrast than I'm used to, but the sharpness is simply staggering considering the lens is about 100 years old. That's a bi difference in lens design philosophy from back in the day versus today. Older lenses increased sharpness by increasing lens lines per millimeter resolution. So, if I remember correctly, the sharpest lens ever made is around 175 lines per millimeter (by comparison, the Pentax FA Limited 31mm and 77mm are around 165 lines and Canon L zoom lenses are around 120 lines) at the sharpest point in the sharpest aperture. However, older lenses appear softer because they lack contrast and acutance when compared to modern lenses. So modern lens design focuses a lot on greater contrast (which manifests as acutance in images) and create images which appear sharper.


Here's a shot with some lanes movement. The lens goes from sharp to buttery nothing pretty fast. But it's got potential, I think.


For comparison, the same shot (different orientation) but with my Caltar lens.

Large Format Smokehouse Ruins

Back in April, I visited Round Valley Regional Park in Brentwood, California, with my Pentax K-7 and a few lenses. At the time, I identified an old stone house along Marsh Creek. On my trip in May, I met a park ranger who told me locals said the stone building was a smoke house, but he didn't know anything more about it than that.

I managed four shots worth sharing from the trip. My goal was mostly to learn about the camera. I attempted one mega macro, extending the Calumet's bellows the full 22 inches. This led to the five-inch width covering about a half inch of real space -- an in-camera 10X macro. Maybe more or less (I didn't measure the subject.) Anyway, the macro didn't turn out, but it's good to know that I have mega macro capacity in my camera all the time.

Another goal was to try some tilts and swings. Here are the first results. For a lens, I have one large-format lens, a Caltar 165mm in a Seikosha SLV shutter. The lens is amazing with substantial movement available and very sharp rendering. The shutter is great with no discernible movement, a very pleasant sound, and reliable times. For film, I used Lucky 100 and Arista 100. I also shot four images on Rollei Orthochromatic ATO 2.1 but have not developed them yet (I just mixed some XTol tonight, though, so those images are likely coming in a future entry.


Testing out a standard shot but at f32 or 45 to obtain the deepest field marked on the shutter. The shutter actually closes down to about f165, and I tried a shot at that aperture. However, I didn't have a very deep range when I tried that, so it's hard to see the difference between f165 and f22. So I'll have to try that again in the future.


This was at the maximum aperture -- f6.3. It's shallow because of the aperture, not because of any Sheimplung-type trickery.


This one, however, is super-shallow due to Sheimpfulng-type trickery. Basically, I went craxy with the shifts and tilts.


I shot this at f8, f22, and f165. This is the best because it's the least blown out of the three. I accidentally made the Ilfosol-3 too strong for the Arista batch, and all the negatives were over developed about a stop and a half. Oops.