Which enlarging lenses should I keep?

[Bob Salomon]

Popcorn time. No fake butter please. Name one lab on the West Coast. I probably knew the owner as well as his equipment and methods. And like I said, what commercial lab ever had the time and budget to do go to that kind of fuss? Even the biggest dye transfer lab in NYC cut corners. And I'm 100% certain you've never even heard of the best equipped lab in this hi-tech area because they were never open to the general public. But their minimum charge of $40,000 pretty much ruled that out. They could certainly many do things alt-wise that I cannot, but it had little to do with optical enlarging. The second best equipped lab you probably never heard of either because the clients were mainly overseas corporations, and it had stunning optical equipment, but not quite like mine. Nor did even they go to extra steps of control dupes etc. Just retired. And frankly, you've never seen my own work, so whether it's great or simply horrible, you'd can't honestly state. And double blind? Does that mean only Rodenstock enlarging-marketed lenses against only similarly marketed lenses, with all the
graphics application ones left out? Even the big labs staked their income on having more options than that. Think I'll grab some popcorn myself and see what follows ...

Drew,

We worked very closely with what was the highest quality lab in the country, they printed mostly for museums, here and overseas, Color Lab that was just outside Boston.
We also sold the plastic slide mounts to almost every lab that did E6 since our parent company, Gepe, owned the patent that Pako manufactured under. We worked directly with a Jack Boucher and Jet Lowe at Habs/Haer in DC. We also worked closely with both the official WH photographers and their DC labs.

So enjoy your popcorn, you were not the only high end game in this country, or other.

[interneg]

It’s been done many times by many labs, studios and government and industrial entities.

I don't disagree - at big sizes the difference a Rodagon-G makes is startling, but when making 2-4x enlargements off smaller formats, a longer focal length makes a huge difference in working clearance!

[Drew Wiley]

I seeee... Not impressed. I do still have some of those of Gepe AN glass mounts for 6x7. What on earth do those have to do with anything besides slide shows? A fellow who once offered me a partnership had been official white house photographer. He still does some of those multimillion dollar TV product ads. The last one fell through because the rap star wearing the stupid tennis shoe label got preempted on a weapons charge and had to go to prison first. I met with one of his clients for breakfast once - the CEO of Mobile in his weekend bluejeans, then we went out and helped some Senator stack firewood in an old truck. It's amazing what kind of clients you can get if you buy a 20K per annum golf membership and routinely let them win the round. I don't golf, so it didn't interest me. But I could sure as heck print better, even way back then. I don't do big mural or alt, just lots of Ciba in the past, and not some b&w mostly. Some major lab owner from the heyday of DT, who made some of its best known public displays for Kodak (ironically, with dyes other than theirs) got into a web brawl with me about DT vs Ciba. So I met with him in person carrying a few prints. That settled that; but what he didn't even recognize were the white borders - they were actually Fuji Supergloss chromogenic prints! Given his background, he would have never imagined that Ciba, let alone color neg hues could be rendered that clean optically. Labs simply can't stay in business taking that kind of fuss. A few hired-gun personal printers can. And that first operation I referenced takes the extra step of outright inventing entirely new photographic reproduction processes on demand. When a single commission can involve millions of dollars, why not. Invent the equipment too if necessary. They simply have to make a profit more often than a loss; but they mainly do it for the challenge. And as far as govt side-by-side testing; c'mon. Every govt agency I noted any optical request about certainly wasn't looking for anything on a shelf somewhere. It was made on demand too, often right near here. Those custom optical folks were my clients in terms of certain materials. Saw the owner several times a week. Hey, an NSA or DEA or NASA card with no credit limit can fetch one hecka lens! Even the Hubbell "reading glasses" correction lenses were made by them. Not like the GSA with their gofer-typed requisition lists of generic commodities.

[Bob Salomon]

Drew, I said we supplied the mounts to labs and Gepe owned the patent for all those plastic slide mounts. The company that invented that mount was Geimuplast in Germany and that was the name that we sold them under. It was a Gepe subsidiary. Gepe was our parent company so we were also responsible for all their mounts from the 70s on, except for 2 years when they were sold by Braun Photo in the very early 80s. So we dealt with almost every USA lab. And we also dealt with them for darkroom accessories, copy stands as well as enlarging lenses.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, I still recommend those mount to beginners who can't afford a serious glass negative carrier, cause it worked for me when I first started out. But only a few months later I abandoned both MF photography and that sold that small enlarger, and went to 4x5, but still had to develop film in the furnace closet! But no, you probably did not deal with all the big labs here. You've probably walked right past one of them and didn't even know it was a lab - too big to be suspected. But you probably did know Howard at Custom Process. Nice guy; but he preferred Apo Rodagons for mural work, so I hope you wont make a little doll of him and stick pins in it. He did a huge volume of business, but eventually got screwed by both a Kodak equip warranty default and the property owner around the same time, so retired. They handled some of my generic company printing, but none of my personal work. What other Bay Area labs do you remember? Sounds like you had a fun but hectic job like mine. Where I worked was never bought out, thank goodness, but generational transitions amounted to the same kind of uncertainty. In family-owned corporations, some of the heirs are themselves hard workers and relatively competent, and some are not. Always a roll of the dice.

[Bob Salomon]

Well, I still recommend those mount to beginners who can't afford a serious glass negative carrier, cause it worked for me when I first started out. But only a few months later I abandoned both MF photography and that sold that small enlarger, and went to 4x5, but still had to develop film in the furnace closet! But no, you probably did not deal with all the big labs here. You've probably walked right past one of them and didn't even know it was a lab - too big to be suspected. But you probably did know Howard at Custom Process. Nice guy; but he preferred Apo Rodagons for mural work, so I hope you wont make a little doll of him and stick pins in it. He did a huge volume of business, but eventually got screwed by both a Kodak equip warranty default and the property owner around the same time, so retired. They handled some of my generic company printing, but none of my personal work. What other Bay Area labs do you remember? Sounds like you had a fun but hectic job like mine. Where I worked was never bought out, thank goodness, but generational transitions amounted to the same kind of uncertainty. In family-owned corporations, some of the heirs are themselves hard workers and relatively competent, and some are not. Always a roll of the dice.

This is a big country and there were lots of labs, not counting industry, government, museums, libraries, etc..
I was the national sales manager for all of our products, product manager for the pro products and also did all of the PR and was the contact between the ad agency. We had 20 sales reps for most of the photo products dealing with the camera stores. In addition we were the distributor for Rimowa luggage up till they built their NA factory in Canada. I was had the same responsibilities for Rimowa until we added someone to handle the luggage dealers and the Geimuplast business for labs.

As I was based out of NJ and spent close to 40% of my time visiting camera stores nationally I did not spend that much time on labs in the West. My sales reps and our dealers were better placed to handle them as well as our Geimuplast rep.

So with labs on the left coast most of my contact with them were on the phone.

I did deal directly with NASA since I sold and trained them on their Linhof Aero Technika 45 EL and Rollei 6008 cameras for the Space Shuttle and their Rollei 6008 photogrammetric cameras for documenting Space Shuttle landings and with folks like Boeing for many of their needs or with Hanford.

[Drew Wiley]

Is the left coast still left if you turn around and face south?

[Pere Casals]

Pere, first, only lenses like a Rodagon G mural printing lens is going to perform optimally close to or at wide open. All others require 2 to 3 stops down.

Bob, just for my learning process, I checked the technical information.

It is true that the G performs a bit better than N (in the graphs) when both are wide open.

But in part this is because the N is one stop faster, graphs show the N at f/4 and f/8 while the G charts are at f/5.6 and f/11

Of course charts are for each lens at suitable ratio, x6 and x20.


Probably the N would perform close to the G if the N was stopped to same f/5.6, guessing from the improvement we see for the N when stopped from f/4 to f/8...



https://onedrive.live.com/?id=8D71BC...71BC33C77D1008


I find those graphs interesting to learn what happens when using an enlarger if a demanding job is course. I find it's not easy to interpret how performance in the graphs does impact in the print quality, but that information should be useful when trying to improve print quality, that's what I feel...


Probably G or N lenses had another contributing factor... people purchasing that kind of gear probably weren't rookie printers, and probably they knew how to make a sound print.

[campy]

Sorry I asked.

[Bob Salomon]

Bob, just for my learning process, I checked the technical information.

It is true that the G performs a bit better than N (in the graphs) when both are wide open.

But in part this is because the N is one stop faster, graphs show the N at f/4 and f/8 while the G charts are at f/5.6 and f/11

Of course charts are for each lens at suitable ratio, x6 and x20.


Probably the N would perform close to the G if the N was stopped to same f/5.6, guessing from the improvement we see for the N when stopped from f/4 to f/8...



https://onedrive.live.com/?id=8D71BC...71BC33C77D1008


I find those graphs interesting to learn what happens when using an enlarger if a demanding job is course. I find it's not easy to interpret how performance in the graphs does impact in the print quality, but that information should be useful when trying to improve print quality, that's what I feel...


Probably G or N lenses had another contributing factor... people purchasing that kind of gear probably weren't rookie printers, and probably they knew how to make a sound print.

Pere, don’t guess, within the optimization range the G was far superior. But it made a lousy print outside its range. Same for the N and the Rodagon and the W/A!