What's your favorite internet falsehood on photography?

[Doremus Scudder]

I'm always amused by the "bellows extension factor" explanations. There's no such thing. Just divide your bellows extension (lens center to ground glass) by the diameter of your aperture. That's your working f/stop.

But no, you have to divide this by that, square it, and use the "exposure compensation factor" to multiply your exposure time.

All these expert internet photographers, and none of them know what an f/stop actually is...

Well, hanging over a cliff on a windy coastline I'd much rather measure my bellows draw and consult my table than measure entrance pupil

But, to each his own. There is more than one way to skin a bellows!

My favorite Photo Phalshood: The Zone System is precise.

Doremus

[angusparker]

Dear Drew,

...Please see https://www.largeformatphotography.i...=1#post1697018

I had the camera upside down, yet the image on the GG was still upside down.

Which way was the real world?

Signed, The-Earth-Is-Flat-God-Needs-A-Tire-Pump

Can’t resist to add that the upside down image on the GG is actually projected right side up on the back of our eyeballs only to be inverted by our brains upside down again! My mind boggles….

[LabRat]

Can’t resist to add that the upside down image on the GG is actually projected right side up on the back of our eyeballs only to be inverted by our brains upside down again! My mind boggles….

But try to explain that a TLR shows image right side up, but reversed L to R (or R to L)...

Strange universe beyond the looking glass... :0

Steve K

[Vaughn]

Can’t resist to add that the upside down image on the GG is actually projected right side up on the back of our eyeballs only to be inverted by our brains upside down again! My mind boggles….

The LF GG image is thrown right side up and backwards on our retinas! Just like we see an image thrown on a TLR GG!!!

I learned photography with a TLR, so I guess I had a head start on it. I think that helped me 'see' the GG image orientated as it will be in the print....there is no 'normal' once one experiences/realizes how much the brain can switch things around.

PS...While using a view camera very early on, I remember a long session under the darkcloth looking at the upside-down image. When I finally poked my head out from under the darkcloth, for a split second the world itself seemed to be upside down.

[Pieter]

https://amp.theguardian.com/educatio...ng-upside-down

[Havoc]

I have watched dozens of you tube videos on photography and at least 99% of them are just bull ****. The darkroom videos are the worst. I have yet to see one that evens shows how to make a proper test strip. There is a ton of misinformation out there.

And they all leave the light on!

lens sunning, uv-c and all the other nonsense people buy into about fungus and photo gear.

And keeping your gear away from it because it can get contaminated. Ignoring the large quantities of spores always in the air.

[Alan Klein]

I'm always amused by the "bellows extension factor" explanations. There's no such thing. Just divide your bellows extension (lens center to ground glass) by the diameter of your aperture. That's your working f/stop.

But no, you have to divide this by that, square it, and use the "exposure compensation factor" to multiply your exposure time.

All these expert internet photographers, and none of them know what an f/stop actually is...

Mark Can you give an example?

[Tin Can]

Every soul spits truth

[David Lindquist]

This is way pre-internet. I recall 60+ years ago when I first got interested in photography I'd occasionally hear people assert with great authority that lenses made before World War II were not "color corrected". Have a hunch they were confounding anti-reflection coating with color correction.

David

[Mark Sawyer]

Mark Can you give an example?

I'm guessing you want an example of figuring your actual f/stop instead of a bellows extension factor.

Say you have a 210mm lens at f/16. At infinity, 210/16 gives an entrance pupil of 13.125mm.

Now say you rack the bellows out to 350mm. Just divide 350 by 13.125 to get your f/stop at that bellows extension: f/26.66.

(Personally, I'd round it off to 350/13 to get f/26.9, and call it f/27.)

Or you can go with the traditional method of dividing, squaring, and multiplying.