I have been using roll film for 30 years and am quite accustom to the type of view a certain lens will give in 35mm and 6x6cm formats. I frequently use lenses of shorter focal lengths. I have tried hard to use the 50mm planar with my 35mm camera, it is one of the sharpest lenses for that system, but any group of good photographs in my portfolio would have probably zero photographs taken with that lens.

Enter 4x5 format. When searching for a cheap camera/lens combo just to ‘try it out,’ I was always put off by offerings with 150 or 180mm lenses. I figured, ‘I don’t like the 50mm lens in 35mm cameras, I won’t like these lenses in 4x5.’ Well, I never wound up getting one of those cheap combos and wound up spending more on a Horseman and some lenses.

Now that I am using 4x5 and have a bunch of lenses, I have some comments on these lenses in the 135 to 180 range. First, some goals I have in 4x5 are the rendition of precise detail, to achieve an ‘image clarity’ not available in smaller formats. It seems once an object falls outside of the focal plane, the effect is lessened. So, as I was shooting with 90 and 105 and 120 mm lenses, I was finding myself wanting to ‘zoom in’ a little more to eliminate foreground objects that won’t be in the sharp focal plane. Next thing you know, I am using the 150 mm lens and liking the results! The other day I even forced myself to try and take some pictures with the 35mm camera using 50 and 60mm lenses to see if is me or what.

Some thoughts on this; first, additional detail in 4x5 allows better transformation of the ordinary to the extrordinary (which is what a lot of my images are about). For example a picture of a bunch of leaves on trees with the 35mm camera and 50mm lens does not do much for me because you can’t make out all the individual trees. But with the 4x5 camera, the fine detail and clarity of seeing all the individual leaves transforms the photograph into extraordinary. And it is the 150 that allows me to ‘tighten up’ the shot to avoid all the extraneous stuff. (In my 35mm photography with the 18mm lens, ‘all that extraneous stuff’ is what the picture is all about.)

Secondly, a common problem I encounter is two planes that intersect at right angles. No camera movement will allow focusing on both planes. An example is a foreground clearing that extends back to meet a wall of trees. Scheimpflug the foreground extending back to the base of the trees and the treetops are out of focus. Focus on the plane of the trees (usually at infinity) and the foreground is blurry. Scheimpflug the near-foreground and tops of the trees, then the center of the picture at infinity (the base of the wall of trees) is blurry, and looks really bad. Stopping down past f22 reduces the lenses resolving power too much for me. I don’t like those pictures where everything is equally blurred by diffraction so it all looks in focus (well it doesn’t to me). So I have been tightening up the shots with the longer (for me) lenses. This allows the image to concentrate on either the distant plane or the foreground plane.

The place that I work has a lot of landscape B&W photography on the walls. Some Ansel Adams reproductions and some good local artists. I have been re-thinkng my interpretation of the lens used for many of the photographs. Whereas I had thought ‘that was taken with a short lens’ in fact it was probably a ‘normal’ lens.