Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster!
I just got myself a Schneider Symmar (not Symmar-S or APO Symmar, just plain Symmar) 150mm f/5.6 lens, which the serial number ages as 1967 or 1968, and I have a few questions about its convertible nature.
As a 150mm lens, it's great, and using it is pretty straightforward. But part of the reason I got it is because it's also supposedly usable as a 265mm f/12 if you remove elements of it.
In its normal 150mm configuration, yep, I rack the bellows out about 150mm from the film plane and yep it's in focus.
If I remove the front element, I get a good deal of magnification, but it now needs to be racked out somewhere in the neighborhood of 300mm for it to focus, which is beyond what my camera can do without rear movements.
If I remove the *rear* element of the lens, I can set the it about 190mm away from the film for some modest magnification.
I'm a bit confused. I was led to believe that in fairly simple lenses, the focal length is approximately equal to the distance of the lens from the film. And in the normal config of this lens, it matches that perfectly. But neither of its "converted" configurations is close to its 265mm rating. Why is that? Also, which one is the "correct" conversion for this lens?
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