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Years ago I exchanged a few emails with Silvia Zawadski and Dick Dickerson of KODAK, who were the inventors of XTOL. They told me that they created it using TMX and TMY in rotary processors...

Same here.



Years ago I exchanged some emails with Silvia Zawadski and Dick Dickerson (creators of XTOL for Kodak). They said they created XTOL using a Jobo rotary processor; that it's...

Yep. This. Exactly this.

Everything in LF is a trade off. If you open up too far you have shallow DOF. If you stop down too far you soften the image through diffraction. Etc. The bottom line as you'll find eventually, is to...

It's not as hard as you might think -- the drill bit is hard, the plastic isn't, the bit is small in diameter, and there's no serious need of accuracy. A few degrees off plumb won't matter much. And...

If the crack continues to propagate (it probably will), you can probably stop if from growing by drilling a small hole (small as in a millimeter in diameter or so; bigger won't make it work better...

Yes, and this is probably the case for the vast majority of exposures. People tend to think that a given exposure is either in reciprocity failure or not. In reality that's hardly ever the case....

Kerry Thalmann was our resident expert in lightweight LFP kit, especially for hiking. He's still keeping his old website up, but it hasn't been updated in quite a while (a couple of decades?). That...

No, not really. Sorry.

OTOH, you got your first lesson in LF -- the ground glass does not lie. It took me a lot longer than my first trip to fully, viscerally, understand that. Once I latched hold...

I found for my landscape work in 5x4 with Tri-X that I routinely had exposures around 1/4s. This meant with Tri-X that I was right on the edge of reciprocity failure in my shadows (Zone III). Try as...

Because... snowmelt! That had to be cold. I hope you were wearing a good jacket with a hood.

One of my primary rules is "look at what everyone else is looking at, then turn around and look directly behind you." It's amazing what else is around -- interesting scenes seldom occur in isolation...

Feh. I stand corrected.

My wife reminded me of a shot I abandoned after pulling the dark slide. I was in the middle of a river. Found a rock with room for me and my tripod and not much else, so...

Interesting question. You do have an insightful streak ;-)

I've abandoned many setups. But I don't think I've abandoned even one where I've inserted a film holder in the camera. If I abandoned a...

What view cameras give you that smaller formats don't is the bellows between the lens plane and the film plane. So you can move the lens separately from the film, utilizing what are generally called...

Looks like lens flare to me.

Well, you did ask for an opinion. Here's mine. In LF, it just doesn't matter. That's one of the major reasons to move up to LF.

One of the things you get by moving to LF is the considerably...

Yes. But it doesn't matter that much since you typically can't use those shutter speeds much anyway. In the decade I kept track of such things I only used a 1/125 speed once or twice. Nothing faster....

I recommend that your first lens be a 150mm, a "normal" lens. Yes, yes, yes, I know you didn't even own such a lens in 135 format. But this isn't 135 format. With LF you have separated the film plane...

If it had to be one of these, the Apo Artar.

When I was faced with this choice, I bought a coated Fujinon-A 240mm f/9 (inside writing?). The second lens I ever bought, and it remains one of my...

Exactly this.

There are learning curves associated with learning camera movements. Initially it can be frustrating, but at some point most of us have an "aha moment" where it all clicks together....

Par for the course I think. Dust is the enemy we can't defeat. All we can hope for is to diminish it.

My prep for road trips used to include cleaning my Harrison -- I'd take the Harrison into my...

I don't have a good idea of how exactly you are scanning, so I can't comment on that. And I don't have any idea of your background, so I'm going to assume you aren't a drum scanner operator. If I'm...

Yawn...

Yep. If you don't want to hear it from me, listen to Doremus here. All he says is true. And the detail backing all this up has already been posted ad infinitum, in a number of threads about this very...

Do some searching. There was a huge discussion over a number of threads about 15 years ago or so.

Bottom line (for me anyway) is that when used with chemical darkroom printing, a film negative is...

Hard to believe that Ron Mowrey who posted as "Photo Engineer" on APUG / PhotoTrio has died. He was an incredible source of knowledge in all things film and chemistry. An excellent teacher with...

Getting the image "distortion free" is largely an exercise in using camera movements. To get the level of control you seem to want can be daunting. And it can take quite a while; these aren't 10...

Indeed, it is not. XTOL is sensitive to dissolved iron. Conventional filtration won't take out the iron. Enough iron and you get "sudden XTOL failure" IIRC (search for it on this site -- it was...

Margaret Bourke-White was the master of handheld 5x4. She put many many covers on Life Magazine, at least some of which were hand-held. Dorothea Lang was another world famous hand-held expert.

Can...

First, define "sharpness".

There are many reasons to use LF. My primary reason was the separation of the film plane and the lens plane so that I could use movements to control the plane of exact...

Half of what you get from a drum scanner is fluid scanning. I wouldn't give you $0.05 for a dry scanned image from a drum scanner.

Sadly, like you I wasted a bunch of time when I first got my...

They would be, yes. Two stops over exposure. You could try developing one stop less. You could go two stops less if you have sufficient development time available. Else you risk streaking.

But...

I've got one (S version). Love it. Probably 30% of my images are from this lens. It's got plenty of coverage so you can play with movements (how else you gonna learn?), and it's sharp as a tack. Hard...

If it's consistent across film holders, it's the camera and not the film holders. Most likely the springs that pull the back toward the camera body to "squeeze" the film holder aren't doing the job...

The short answer is no.

The long answer is that the point of recycling is to create a new paper base that can be used to make more products. Mixing all kinds of papers together into a batch makes...

I don't -- what are the reasons I'm not supposed to want one? I've always thought they would be a pretty good idea. Especially when you get down to, say, 80mm or less on 5x4. About the point were you...

Not really, because real sunlight at the surface of the planet is a variable. It literally varies from minute to minute, day to day, and season to season. It's different from cloudy to clear, all...

I've said for years that TMY2 is the best film ever made. Period. And it is well worth its price.

But my saying it means exactly zilch to anyone who hasn't personally experienced it. Now that you...

Yup. This. Exactly this.