Thanks Jim. I have found by trial and a lot of error that my eyes still have enough accomodation that I see much more structure in the ground glass image than ends up in the print - I'm using the non-scattered light to see somewhat in front of and behind the focal plane. I actually spent some time trying to use 'bad' bokeh to create texture in scenes with a lot of tight, calligraphic detail, but eventually realised that most of what was exciting me on the ground glass was never making it into the final print.
I quite often aim for an 'all-over' composition without a single centre of interest, in which case the smaller aperture tends to win. It took me a long time to learn that for these types of photograph a narrower depth of field makes things look *more* three-dimensional in the final print, in contradiction to the case with wide-angle f64 type scenics. I now think of DOF as flattening or expanding the depth of the printed image, rather than just being a measure of sharpness.
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