Cooke Series XVa Convertible - Opinions and Experiences?

[Ari]

This has turned out to be a really interesting thread!

It really has!
Folks, the fact that the Cooke doesn't have 20 or 30 shutter blades is of no concern to me; you can see how beautifully it renders backgrounds.
I'm sure I won't go to extraordinary lengths to have a round aperture when, most of the time, those specular highlights aren't even present.

I'll get around to replying to everybody in just a little while; thank you all very much for the input.
It's been, and continues to be, a very educational topic.

[Ari]

@Bernice,
Thank you for all the information, it is quite eye-opening. But:
I am not a lens tester, I am just seeing what the Cooke can do under my normal use. I'm not one for numbers and crunching ratios to find out which lens is best on paper.
Also, I gave up studio shooting entirely six years ago, and don't care much for the look anymore. I do admire those who do it well, though.
But to test the lens under studio conditions would be meaningless to me, as I'd never use it that way.
I just wanted to test the lens myself, and show the results, in the hope it would help us understand why the Cooke is a very expensive high-quality lens, and what it can do that other lenses can't, if anything.

And as I said earlier, I have no other lenses here, they are all sold, except for a Grandagon 115 which doesn't help us here.
But if somebody wants some testing done against one of their lenses (modern glass, coatings & shutter), I'd be happy to be a scientist for a day, and follow Bernice's excellent guide to lens testing.

Shush :-)

One rule of enabling is "Why yes, that lens is clearly better!"

I knew at least one person would understand.

[VictoriaPerelet]

....

* Using the same aperture.

* Similar to as close as possible lens focal length and bellows draw to achieve near identical image reproduction ratio between the reference lens and lens under test.

* Identical lighting conditions (this is where artificial light and studio conditions can work well). Very slight differences in lighting will have a significant effect on the image.

* Same batch of film verified using the emulsion lot number.

* Film developed in the same run / batch of chemistry.

......

Back in the day, most of the lens testing that was done happened under very controlled studio lighting conditions using color transparency film all processed the same day, same batch. The goal was to reduce the number of variables as much as possible keeping the variable limited to the lens alone.

.....

In case if you are not allergenic to digital, digital back is pretty much ultimate tool for doing comparisons. Eliminates a lot of extra steps. Even Cooke webpage refers to betterlight digital files.

http://www.cookeoptics.com/l/largeformat.html

[Ari]

Ari,

I'm not a technical guy. I see things that I like and things that I don't care for as much. To my eye the Cooke has a dimensionality that I don't see in the other images. Personally, I love that. It feels less like a photograph and more like I'm there. The tones and transitions are beautiful. I dig it.

I have seen incredible work done using the KCE (Karsh for example) but the level of skill and post is way beyond my skill level. Some lenses seem to make the look and feel that I personally prefer just a bit easier to achieve. My Heliar on LF and my 105mm f2.4 on my Pentax 67 for example. (I've never had a chance to shoot with a Cooke up to this point so I can't comment personally on that.) But I do really like the potential that you're digging into with this lens.

Follow that little passionate voice in your head and you'll find your personal sweet-spot regardless of what the numbers say.

Tim
www.ScottPhoto.co

Tim,
Thank you, I really appreciated that post.
I'm definitely following it, despite (in spite of?) number-crunching; I'm really starting to take a shine to the Cooke.
Having never seen a lens that looks quite like this one, I have to go on instinct alone, and what I think is important in the photographs I tend to make.
I, too, am not a technical person, not very scientific, and some days I am outright dull. So I have my own taste and experience to go on, not much else.
Thanks again.

[Ari]

That's a great shot, Ari. And Richard seems to really know how to pose!

The light looks significantly better/contrasty with the Cooke shoot - is it about 2 stops lower? (the last headshots you compare)

Thank you, sir! Richard is a natural.
The light here was pretty contrasty, but the bright light was only 1/2 stop brighter than the previous shots done that day.

[Ari]

To compare lenses, it's best to scan images together at the same time, or re-use the settings exactly across all scans.

If we allow the scanner to merely perform a "straight scan", the scanner software will apply a different tonal adjustment to each image, according to its own logic. Subsequent comparisons may be confusing at best.

Is there a way to do that on a v750 without damaging one or both sheets of film?

[Ari]

In case if you are not allergenic to digital, digital back is pretty much ultimate tool for doing comparisons. Eliminates a lot of extra steps. Even Cooke webpage refers to betterlight digital files.

http://www.cookeoptics.com/l/largeformat.html

Thank you, Victoria; I would love to, if I could get access to a BL back for a few days, and if someone has a specific request to test a particular lens.

[Clive Russ]

Ari has pointed me to this thread. He is having fun with a Cooke XVa while I am enjoying my newly purchased FLM carbon fiber tripod which is so much nicer than any other carbon fiber tripod I have seen in the past. Until now, I have used Linhof aluminum tripods because I found most carbon fiber tripods were over rated.

Thank you for all the interesting comments. I enjoyed watching the video showing the Leica/Cooke lens image comparisons.

With a small lens, like the Cooke movie lens shown in the video comparison with a Leica lens, the round (or pentagonal Copal) aperture plays a more prominent role. In a longer 12” Cooke XVa, I have never seen the aperture show in background specular highlights. At ƒ/11 and wider apertures, the five bladed Copal apertures tend toward looking round. At ƒ/64 (small, pentagonal aperture) I don’t notice any ugly projection of the aperture in background highlights because the image is more “in focus”.

The difference in contrast of the image on the negative shows both in the overall image and the micro contrast. The whole image is improved by the really excellent modern multi coatings on the XVa. The effect is that the highlights are not “flared” out and the shadows reveal separation of the details. The whites look like cream, not chalk. The shadows don’t look like soot. A little more exposure and less development would be advantageous for the Cooke negatives. The mid tones are also helped (look more tactile) by the coatings, but it is not as easy to see. The extra exposure would be like sliding up the brightness slider in PhotoShop, a favorite adjustment.

Karsh, the great portrait photographer, often used Kodak Commercial Ektar (KCE) lenses, 12” and 14”, which are very sharp in the center (and quickly fall off toward the astigmatised edges). They also have a fairly curved field which follows the round faces he was photographing. He underexposed the film and pushed the development, by about two stops. Norman Partington did the same for portraits, as did Ansel Adams for landscapes. The mushiness of the shadows was hidden in the dark zones, two and three. The highlights blew out (flared), but they were usually just the tiny specular highlights on the skin. He used the limitations of the lens coatings (single MgFl on the KCEs) and the curved field of the four element lens to artistic advantage. Tri-X, with its long toe, helped the mid tones and highlight contrast, compensating for the veiling flare in the image, at the expense of the shadow contrast where it was less noticeable.

Even Tri-X could not help a KCE when photographing a white building in direct sunlight. That would look like chalk no matter what you did. With a Cooke XVa, it would look pretty good, certainly much better than anything from an instant capture digital back.

[Ken Lee]

Is there a way to do that on a v750 without damaging one or both sheets of film?

Photos of different subjects, shot on different films and developed differently will look different to a consumer scanner like the Epson: it will automatically apply a different correction to each one. Comparing highlight and shadow rendering this way may be more of a game of chance than we'd like.

However, we can jot down the settings from the first scan and apply them again in subsequent scans. See http://www.kenleegallery.com/html/tech/scanning.php

It's probably a good idea to adjust the scanner to render the blank film edge as 0 on the brightness scale (or do it in your photo editor), especially if we're trying to compare the contrast of different lenses. This is especially true if we're looking at images shot and developed at different times on different film/developer combinations, since each will have its own "base + fog" level.

For an example of a lens comparison where the "variables" have been kept to a minimum, click here. For the record, this test is still flawed because the Heliar exhibited focus-shift when stopped down. For the same test made with three 150mm lenses, click here.

One of the best test series has been done by Armin Seeholzer, but I can't find it on the web at the moment.

[StoneNYC]

Is there a way to do that on a v750 without damaging one or both sheets of film?

Damaging?

Certainly wouldn't damage the film.

If you look at the pre-scan, there are black and white numbers and numbers in the center, they often look like this...

[64] [0.97] [200]

Or some variation of that pattern. You mark those down, then when you select the second piece of film to be scanned, after the pre-scan you change the pre scan numbers to match the first scans numbers.

This gives you matching white, black, and mid points. Then you can truly see the difference in the film's before the scanner auto exposure gets involved.