Dude. You took one handheld shot without focusing and that leads you to believe it's impossible to get a tack sharp LF image? Get real.Originally Posted by BetterSense
What you need is not the MTF chart for your film, it's a fucking tripod and 10X loupe.
You ain't found the bottom. You've still got a ways to go.
If you want resolution, technique is everything. This is true in all formats, from smallest to biggest.
From a technique standpoint, I think you're doing three things poorly right off the bat. In no particular order, use a tripod, use a cable release (give the camera 5+ seconds to quit vibrating after you let go of it -- then trip the shutter), and focus with a loupe.
Once you've done those three, you might want to try it at f/16 or even f/22. Older lenses (especially symmetrical designs IIRC) tend to reduce aberrations as you reduce the aperture. As you go smaller, it's a trade off between the aberrations and diffraction.
In the end you may want to use more modern glass. But that would be way down on my list of things to try first to improve your resolution problems.
As an aside, it took me several years to learn how to make a negative worthy of a really large print (in the 10-12x enlargement range). It's all about technique and judgment, especially when it comes to using camera movements well. And that takes practice, practice, practice. Of course.
Bruce Watson
Since I work in this building afterall, I'll go back sometime at the same time of day and reshoot with a tripod, smaller aperture, and a loupe, but the same film. Then i'll make the same scaled print and see how it compares.
Just for some perspective (no pun intended):
In order to get a very sharp picture, people spend $1000 on a tripod instead of $300 just to achieve a little more stability. People shield the whole camera/tripod setup with a windbreak to keep wind from moving the camera even slightly, and we all use a cable shutter release so we won't shake the camera by tripping the shutter. i.e, we don't even touch the camera, even though it is on a tripod.
And you shot hand-held. Of course it's blurry. If it wasn't, you'd be a neurosurgeon/sniper. Have you ever shot 35mm with a 500mm lens? Hand held?
I shoot a lot of film hand-held, mostly 120, 3x4, and 4x5. As others have mentioned you have run into a problem with your technique, not your equipment. To allay your fears take a similar shot with 35mm using the same technique and blow it up to the same relative image size. More than likely you will be much happier with your 4x5 shot after that.
Don't worry about your gear, it'll out-perform you and just about everyone else out there any day of the week. Technique is where you will make it out break it.
Printing just adds opportunities to degrade image quality. The smart way to see how much detail a negative holds is to look at it directly.
You need to rule out the degredation of the enlarger also. If their is no movement blur, maybe the lens focus slipped a little.
Yes I have, and the character of the resultant blurring was always a kind of smearing that was directional. In other words, motion blur as one usually imagines it. I don't see that in my picture at all. I have a hard time believing that motion blur could result in this kind of even, isotropic blurring in all directions, during a 1/100s exposure. If it did, it would be more of a vibration phenomenon than a motion blur, in which case handholding shouldn't make much difference, or even damp the camera more because I was holding it. But who knows. I'll test it and see.And you shot hand-held. Of course it's blurry. If it wasn't, you'd be a neurosurgeon/sniper. Have you ever shot 35mm with a 500mm lens? Hand held?
I suspect you are right, and the issue is focus accuracy. Remember that depth of field is narrower for larger formats, because you are using longer lenses to achieve the same field of view. Your f/11 in 4x5 is actually quite wide open--equivalent for the purposes of depth of field to maybe f/5.6 on a 35mm camera.
In the old days of 4x5 press photography, the photographers weren't targeting 40x50" prints. They were targeting newspaper prints, or 8x10's for sale to the clients. Thus, they could focus using the coupled rangefinder and stop down to f/11 and make it work. Photographers making big prints in those days used tripods, as they do now.
When you are evaluating the image at 10x, then you need to view the ground glass at 10x to see the same level of detail.
And that is a truth even if the ground glass is accurate, which you may need to confirm.
I would conduct a test using a tripod, focusing carefully with a 10x loupe, and then using maybe f/22. That should give you an idea of what is attainable with your lenses and processes. If that doesn't improve things, and if the image on the ground glass looks better than the image on the film, then you know the problem is either the ground glass position or some part of the downstream process.
Rick "eliminate variables" Denney
It sounds more like you've only just scratched the surface. Large format photography demands care, patience, persistence, and technical knowledge to get good results.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks