We were flying the campus and the dorms looking for crowd gatherings. When printing 5x5 to 20x20 with a Log E enlarger and putting one probe on a window and then other on a spectral we could actually see into the rooms!Originally Posted by jp
We were flying the campus and the dorms looking for crowd gatherings. When printing 5x5 to 20x20 with a Log E enlarger and putting one probe on a window and then other on a spectral we could actually see into the rooms!
In the 70's near where I live now we had large rural parties, kinda like Honeysuckle Rose movie with Willie Nelson. A great movie BTW.
But for several years we were aerial observed by the Air Force flying a big airplane very low, very slow. They were using a movie camera hanging out the wide door. Maybe stills too. I have wrote about this on the forum before.
We were skinny dipping in the pond and It looked like the soldiers were going to fall out getting a good look at naked women.
I think Bob commented before on the Air Force base they came out of.
Nobody cared, not us and not the soldiers, but somebody sent that aircraft our way.
Sure they were grabbing license plates and faces. I could clearly see the photographers.
Tin Can
I remembered after my last post that I have a drill press now and hole saws that work on metal. I grabbed one of my spare Pacemaker boards and luckily had an appropriate size. A little rasping to fit the lens in the throat of the camera and a light application of glue and I now have this lens mounted, that I've had banging around for the better part of a decade. I actually had a metalshop look at this lens/camera but he was too afraid of breaking something he never fabricated what I wanted and gave it back.
The 6" AE is much less common from my experience, and I have seen a couple sold at very high prices on eBay. Not sure why. The lens says "4 1/2 x 4 1/2" but I think it will "cover" 4x5. It has pretty bad staining on the rear element so is probably about f/4 in transmission. I'll give it a whirl soon.
Bryan, as I calculate it a 4.5" square's diagonal is ~ 6.3 inches. So the 150/2.5 AE should cover 4x5 without movements.
What's wrong with most of the ones offered is that they're fixed aperture. Not what we want for most applications.
As long as this thread is drifting, beware of 6"/2.8 Elcan lenses with serial numbers starting with 138. They are telephoto lenses that cover 6x6 and have very short back focus, > 2".
If you must get a 6"/2.8 Elcan for 4x5, get one with s/n starting with 180. These cover 4x5, just, and have reasonable back focus, a bit less than 4".
Neither is easy to put in shutter.
Funny you should mention that. That's why my 4"/2 TTH stays home most of the time. Its no better than a good tessar or plasmat or ... type from around f/8 down, its heavy and I can use it only on my little Speed Graphic.Yeah this one has no aperture. Of course, if I want to shoot at f/22, I have other lenses.
I have a couple of those 6" f/2.5 aero ektars (mine are branded by Bell and Howell - several companies made them to the military spec). Also have no aperture, though I think there are some apertures from Edmund Optics that could be made to work. I cleared one of them (mostly) with UV, the other still needs it done. They are a nice lens, a complex design similar to the 7" f/2.5 aero ektar. Heavy beasts. I could spare one if someone was in the market.
Also have a couple of those 6" f/2.8 lenses from aerojet/delft / CAI that were used in the more modern military 5" roll film cameras (I forget the designation offhand...), they have apertures but I have yet to get around to mounting them to use on a camera.
-Ed
One of the boxes my dad sent home at the end of the war included several 8x10 prints of what I interpret to be bomb damage assessment images, made in 1944 and early 1945. I suspect the original collages were large enough for squadron review meetings, and the copies were made for reference.
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