Front movements when using long lenses

[Diane Maher]

When you are focusing a lens, say, 600 mm, and you want to do front tilt, do you have to get out from under the darkcloth? I'm just wondering as I have trouble doing front tilts with my 19 in. lens on my 8x10 Ansco.

[Walter Calahan]

Depends on how long your arms are?

I can do tilts and swings with my Nikkor 600 and my Cooke XVa configured at 645 from under my darkcloth on my Canham 8x10. When I go to the Nikkor 800 or 1200 configuration I've got to walk around to adjust the lens (guess-ta-mation).

On my Arca-Swiss 4x5 and my Fujinon 600 I must walk around.

[Leonard Evens]

As Walter pointed out, it would depend first on how long your arms are. But an additional factor might be whether your lens is of telephoto design or not. If it isn't, there should be no special problem except for the need to reach the controls. In general, the tilt should be done about the front principal point or else you will need to refocus significantly after tilting to move the tilt axis back there. If the lens is of telephoto design, then the principal points may be well in front of the lens. Of course, those of us with base tilt are used to this since we always tilt about an axis not through a principal point. but if your camera has axial tilt and your lens is of telephoto design, then you would find that methods attuned axis tilt no longer work.

[Diane Maher]

I never really thought that my arms were short, and none of my lenses are of a telephoto design. My camera is a field camera with a rear bed that I have to work with when focusing.

[James E Galvin]

You might estimate front tilt, then fine tune with back tilt.

[Diane Maher]

Depends on how long your arms are?

I can do tilts and swings with my Nikkor 600 and my Cooke XVa configured at 645 from under my darkcloth on my Canham 8x10. When I go to the Nikkor 800 or 1200 configuration I've got to walk around to adjust the lens (guess-ta-mation).

On my Arca-Swiss 4x5 and my Fujinon 600 I must walk around.

This is the main reason I haven't bought any lenses longer than the 19 in. one. Thanks for your responses, everyone.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Do you have rear tilt on your camera? If you do, you could do it Sinar style and figure out how much tilt you need with rear tilt, measure it, and then relevel the rear standard, and apply the opposite tilt to the front standard.

How do you measure it if the camera doesn't have scales like a Sinar? I use a Sunnto Tandem clinometer-compass, which will let you measure tilt and swing on any camera (unless there is something strongly magnetic on the camera, which will interfere with swing measurements, but not tilt). It's handy for checking the parallelism of the front and rear standards on floppy cameras without detentes, and you could also use it to measure the inclination of the focal plane, say, if you use the Rodenstock swing/tilt calculator. You can find them used on eBay, usually from people who install satellite dishes.

For measuring just tilt, an angle-finding level like this one is less expensive than the Sunnto, but also a bit less precise--

http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/temp/anglefinder.jpg

[Diane Maher]

I'm shooting with an Ansco 8x10 and it does have some rear tilt. The way the front tilt operates is clumsy when I'm under the darkcloth and have the bellows racked out to infinity focus with the 19 inch lens. I'm just wondering how you guys with your 600 mm plus lenses do it. I have no plans to get a 600 mm myself.

[David A. Goldfarb]

What I'm suggesting is that you use the rear tilt to determine how much tilt you need on the front standard.

Tilt the rear until the focal plane is where you want it on the groundglass. Measure it with a clinometer or angle-finding level against the groundglass, and then zero the rear standard so that it's plumb again. At this point you can get out from under the darkcloth, and apply the opposite tilt to the front standard using the clinometer. You'll also need to adjust rise/fall when you apply the front tilt.

[alec4444]

David, thanks, that's a really helpful tip. All my starter lenses are wide, but that questions has crossed my mind a few times. Was wondering if I needed two Nextels and my wife's help....

<<BREEEEEP>> Honey, I need approx 10 degrees right swing.
<<BREEEEEP>> Um, sorry, that was too far...

--A

[sanking]

If you have a copy of Leslie Stroebel View Camera Technique read Chapter Two on View Camera Movements and go through some of the exercises. A few hours of practice in playing with the movements on a view camera is usually enough to give a person a very clear idea of what is needed to achieve a specific goal.

My arms are not long enough to use front movements with a 600mm lens, but I don't normally use this procedure anyway. Instead, I first carefully examine the plane of the subject and the plane of the ground glass and then adjust the movement on the plane of the lens board so that it meets at a common point with imaginary lines originating at the plane of the subject and the plane of the ground glasss.

Stroebel describes this as follows. "Adjustment of the lens or back can be made more accurately and more rapildy if the photographer notes that to obtain overall sharp focus the plane of the subject, the plane of the lensboard, and the plane of the back muste either be parallel to each other or meet at a commong point -the Scheimpflug rule." I find that in practice this method of adjusting movement for overall sharpness is both faster and more accurate than fiddling with adjustments and examining the results on the ground glass, and is especially useful in low light conditions.

Sandy King