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Not sure, but I think the mirroring Mark is referring to is silver migration, where the metallic silver migrates to the surface and forms a reflective metallic sheen that may have various colors...

I was referring to the optical axis of the lens, not on/off axis tilts of the standards. If you tilt the lens, you tilt the axis.

True, but front swing takes the lens off-axis, requiring more lens coverage and swinging the plane of focus off the focal plane.

Get a little, lose a little...

I don't think much of Deardorffs, which some photographers have an almost religious devotion to.

And most YouTube LF videos are full of bad information from experts who just got their first 4x5....

And a "must-have" for any collector...

I'd rather have people ask why I burned my prints than ask why I didn't...

There's also the old saying, "the garbage can is the most under-used tool in the darkroom".

There's an old story about Ansel Adams keeping his slightly flawed work prints. Adams was also generous about reviewing visiting photographers' portfolios. If a visitor seemed sufficiently full of...

My silver nitrate bath is well over ten years old and has had well over a thousand plates through it. With occasional maintenance and replenishing, I expect many more years out of it.

Simple plexiglass or 3D printed silver tanks for wet plate would be nice to have at a reasonable price. Most people could make their own wooden boxes to hold them, so just the tanks. Currently, 4x5...

Perhaps just repaint the offending area black, then re-enact your font on or through that?

Very nicely done!

Most of us keep at least cursory notes on each exposure, such as lens, f/stop, development time that will be needed...

I keep mine on little post-it notes stuck to the dark slide, with the...

Sounds like it's the collodion, as the other chemicals are known to work. The amount of salts (the bromides and iodides) is pretty forgiving as they're both well past saturated solutions, (you can't...

Welcome to the forum!

Your problems could have any number of sources, the developer, the silver bath (did you season it?), the collodion, light leaks, exposure, some misstep in processing, the...

Each diminishing stop decreases the aperture area by half, regardless of focal length. What might change is the degree of magnification of the aperture by the front element/entrance pupil, but this...

Phoenix in June? You're going to love it... :rolleyes:

There's a good-sized contingent of large format photographers in Tucson if you'd care to visit. Around a dozen of us gather for coffee...

A six-inch lens on a 4x5 is equivalent to a 150mm lens on a 4x5.

Best not to think in terms of equivalents and just let large format be its own thing. Asking "what lens would I use on a 35mm?"...

Fascinating history; so that's part of how the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography had a chance to get its foot in Adams' door...

Thanks, Merg!

I wish I could afford an assistant to blame things on... :rolleyes:

Actually, that's Edwin McMillan, who did win the Nobel prize in 1951.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1951/mcmillan/biographical/

Oh, it's easy to find! It's all over the place!

(Actually, the achromatic doublet at the rear corrects the Verito fairly well, though not perfectly. Most of the Verito's soft effect comes from...

I searched but couldn't find it, though there were a number of images of Adams making the portrait. Just none of the actual portrait.

Perhaps he forgot to pull the dark slide...

I suppose you could use the Imagon as a close-up diopter, just as you could use any positive single-celled lens (front of a Petzval, rear of a Tessar or Verito, half a Rapid Rectilinear...) as a...

Actually, 1/4 of the sum.

For 8x10 and 11x14, I'd suggest a +3 diopter (333mm) and a +2 diopter (500mm). Whole sets including those and a +1 (1000mm) and +10 (100mm) are cheap. If you want to...

Cross-referencing to this thread taht has some good information:

https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?166671-References-on-the-meanings-of-colored-lens-dots

Looks like a generic English Rapid Rectilinear. Should be a decent lens, if a little slow at f/8. Very likely original to the camera.

I don't know why, but for a string of focal lengths Wollensak made the Series II in half-inch increments, 14", 14.5", 15", 15.5", and 16". There's also a 19" and a 19.5".

If you really want the soft focus feature, you can remove the front engraved ring and put a spacer behind the front element to move it out farther, then reassemble. Moving the front element out is...

I've been following Watkins for decades, and have a special interest in historic lenses, so I've accumulated some notes through the years. Watkins also used a Grubb C Aplanat, (a single doublet),...

Keep in mind Watkins used Rapid Rectilinears (maximum aperture f/8) for his smaller plates. He only had one lens for his mammoth camera, a 16-inch Globe lens, which was only sharp between f/36 and...

If you got a UV filter from the same manufacturer as your ND filter, I'd assume they would have the same base glass, ergo the same focus shift. (You might want to ask the manufacturer about this.)...

Terminology-wise, a single element or doublets have a very large circle of illumination, meaning they light up a large area. But they have small circle of coverage, where the image would be...

With apologies for posting the listing, here's a NOBA I'd never seen before...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133766545649?hash=item1f251b80f1:g:zekAAOSwCitgpp9j

You might be able to trim down an old wooden 8x10 back to fit the existing back the same way your 10x12 plate holders do. Then you could use standard 8x10 film holders which are easily converted for...

Splitting hairs, like hammers don't drive nails, people drive nails. Computers have been used heavily by those designing and redesigning optics for a long time.

Bernice's original question was...

The performance difference between a 1980's "vintage" computer-designed multi-coated lens and a 2021 "modern" computer-designed multi-coated lens is less than negligible.

Most photographers using...

The image must be hosted on another site, like Flickr, and a link posted here which automatically posts the image from that site.

Maybe their "Vision of America" is "Diversity Through Exclusion"?

I'd say bellows support is necessary when the bellows starts to vignette the image frame, or more rarely, if the wind starts moving it about. Like Bob said, just tuck something under the bellows to...