Bausch & Lomb 6 inch EF... f/1.4??

[Carsten Wolff]

So I made the worst lensboard ever out of cardboard from a box of tacos to block light and held the lens up by hand to my 8x10. Looks like at "portrait" distances (<10 feet) it may be able to cover 4x5. I'll have to try it out during daylight to see if it covers more. The question now is how to build a camera around this lens. Probably some sort of pipe... flange-back distance is so short bellows would be pointless.

I used the carcass of a Speed-Graphic for my fast lens, (a 4" or larger Packard shutter would work in your case too, I gather), and am not bothering with variable focus. Infinity with fast lenses is usually boring anyway ; so my 145mm f1.25 is set to 1m (= nice head portrait distance) and I focus by having the whole camera on a rack and pinion gear-stage for fine focus. You could go to e.g. box-in-a-box of course if you did want to be able to focus. Check first if you have enough ground-glass clearance.

[Amedeus]

Somewhat blasphemous but this would be a good candidate for MF use ... ;-)

So I made the worst lensboard ever out of cardboard from a box of tacos to block light and held the lens up by hand to my 8x10. Looks like at "portrait" distances (<10 feet) it may be able to cover 4x5. I'll have to try it out during daylight to see if it covers more. The question now is how to build a camera around this lens. Probably some sort of pipe... flange-back distance is so short bellows would be pointless.

[Harold_4074]

It might seem so, but then again you might be surprised. I have an adaptation to put a 9" Series II Velostigmat (soft-focus portrait lens, intended for 4x5) on a Hasselblad. It was a fun thing to do, but I wouldn't do it again---the MF negative only uses the center of the field, which is neither sharp by MF standards (i.e., good enough to make a reasonable enlargement) nor soft in LF terms (that nice glow from contact print size up to about 2-3 X enlargement). I think the technical term for this image quality is "blah". (The penalty for heresy, as imposed by the mythical gods of large format?)

Only the experiment will tell, but if the fluoroscopy lens has (as I would expect) relatively low definition uniformly across the field, it could make a decent informal portrait lens. If you want selective depth of field, this optic will certainly do it for you!

[Amedeus]

I agree that you have to try this first and the results are not necessarily what you're looking for.

This said, I've adapted a Eidoscope #4, Kalosat 1A, Hermagis Cine Petzval and Karl Struss Pictorial 9" for use on a 645 camera with digital back and I'm extremely happy with what I get. Can't post images here (heresy) but you can find a few in my infrequently updated blog. Currently working on portraits and those will be posted to my blog also early May. Next lens to put on this camera is a 6 1/8" Verito.

All of the above lenses except the Hermagis Cine are designed for 4x5 and I also shoot them on 4x5. Agreed the look on MF is different, but I wouldn't call it "blah" ;-)

YMMV,

It might seem so, but then again you might be surprised. I have an adaptation to put a 9" Series II Velostigmat (soft-focus portrait lens, intended for 4x5) on a Hasselblad. It was a fun thing to do, but I wouldn't do it again---the MF negative only uses the center of the field, which is neither sharp by MF standards (i.e., good enough to make a reasonable enlargement) nor soft in LF terms (that nice glow from contact print size up to about 2-3 X enlargement). I think the technical term for this image quality is "blah". (The penalty for heresy, as imposed by the mythical gods of large format?)

Only the experiment will tell, but if the fluoroscopy lens has (as I would expect) relatively low definition uniformly across the field, it could make a decent informal portrait lens. If you want selective depth of field, this optic will certainly do it for you!