Guess I am fussier than most. I use a 30x mini microscope for critical focus. I find that it significantly improves the very fine detail in the negative. Previoulsy I had a 10x Nikon loupe, but find the 30x magnification makes a difference.
Guess I am fussier than most. I use a 30x mini microscope for critical focus. I find that it significantly improves the very fine detail in the negative. Previoulsy I had a 10x Nikon loupe, but find the 30x magnification makes a difference.
I know most people prefer 4x, but I use a 7x loupe. It weighs nothing, doesn't cost a fortune, and takes up no space, and it lets me be sure that the focus is as good as I can make it, which is reassuring. After all the other fussing and setup to get a shot, I think it is a hasty, false economy not to take ten seconds to loupe it.
Recently I acquired a 4x5 with a metal folding sunshade. I find that I can actually use the loupe inside it, even though it is 3-4" away from my eye. Maybe I'll buy one of those extra long loupes one day.
Hey, if you don't use a loop with your large format camera, and the picture is out of focus, maybe you can pass it off as a pinhole picture or maybe even a zone disk picture. Call it art if it's fuzzy. <tongue in cheek>
The only trouble with doin' nothing is you can't tell when you get caught up
Um, Paul I've been reading propaganda about zone disks and such recently. The people selling 'em insist that they have focal lengths and have to be focused. They say that if one is used without focusing the image will be, um, fuzzier.
Cheers,
Dan
I must be out of the loupe (pun intended). What is a "zone disk"?
I shoot 8x10. SO far I only contact print, but that's just because I don't have my 8x10 enlarger working yet. I usually focus by eye wide open (at f/10!) and then check focus and adjust as needed with a cheap 10x loupe.
JL, by an odd coincidence zone plates are being discussed in the "great leap backwards" thread. Read it, chase the URLs given.
Cheers,
Dan
For a while I got a bit lazy and stopped using a loupe when focusing my 8x10, figuring that it wasn't necessary to be so precise when shooting for contact printing. I started checking myself and found that, when viewed with a loupe, my naked eye focusing could be quite far off. I now think that even for contacts, it's good to use a loupe.
SOT, I have a zone plate camera, they work just like pinhole cameras, but with exposure times an order of magnitude faster. In both cases the hole or plate must be the correct distance from the film plane, according to its size. In a bellows camera, I guess this would constitute focussing. But most are built into inexpensive wooden box cameras, of fixed 'focus'.
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