I'm looking for a 360mm lens for my 4x5 sometime in the future. What are your thoughts on the best 355mm - 400mm lens?
Here is my current line-up of lenses: Nikkor 90/4.5, Schneider Symar Convertable 150/5.6 or 6.5 (I forget), Xenotar 135/3.5, and Kodak Ektar 203/7.7.
I'm looking for a lens that is longer than the long-normal 203, and slightly telephoto for focusing in on narrower points of interest. I took a shot I'm happy with with my Oly E-3 at 50mm (equiv to 375 on 4x5), which is almost twice the effective focal length.
I'm looking for a good all-around lens, with emphasis on sharpness and coverage; but I don't want another monster like my Nikkor 90/4.5. I suppose the 203/7.7 was easy enough to focus, but the light was good, and I haven't tried it in dimmer light. So somewhere in-between those two extremes would be good, with more leaning towards a size/weight of the 203/7.7.
Anyone have any thoughts?
Here's a list of a few possibilities I found:
355 Schneider G-Claron
360 Nikon Nikkor W
360 Schneider APO-Symmar
360 Fuji Fujinon CM-W
360 Rodenstock APO-Sironar S
360 Rodenstock APO-Sironar N
360 Rodenstock APO-Ronar
360 Nikon Nikkor T ED
400 Schneider APO-Tele-Xenar HM
400 Schneider APO-Tele-Xenar HM Compact
400 Fuji Fujinon T
I'm also looking for something under $500, so I guess that rules out the 360 Nikkor.
Funny Backstory
Here's the backstory to that. At the Outer Banks, I went to a foggy "tree island" place on Manteo / Roanoke "Island". I took a picture of a tree with fog in the background and some distant trees behind it; looks like something in Africa. Took it with my Olympus E-3 at 50/11. Now, equivalent LF focal length is 375mm, but my longest lens is the Ektar 203/7.7. So I took a shot of it, framing as best I could, at 203/45.
As it turns out, the film I took that shot with was horribly mashed into the film holder; I had loaded it one evening -- after I'd had several glasses of wine -- and this was before I realized the film had to go behind the metal rails. So I stuck it in the same way as the dark-slide cover came out, then put the dark-slide cover over it. The result was of course a scratched piece of film which was really out of proper alignment.
But because I shot at f/45, I still got a great tack-sharp image (and the numerous scratches were taken care of by the diligent work of Edgar Praus at Praus Productions upon scanning in). After scanning, I got the CD, and cropped that picture to the same framing as my shot with my Olympus lens at almost twice the effective focal length. This was throwing away a lot of the data; file-size went from 733 to 207 MB. The picture still significantly outresolves my Olympus E-3 shot, I'd say by at least 2x as much.
Comparing straight from the scan vs. out-of-JPEG for Olympus, the colors are of course different, with Olympus' colors being more saturated green, but still not showing some detail areas and different sections as well. There is also considerably more latitude for enhancing color with the 4x5 image before running into awful issues with banding; although I am comparing it to a JPEG, the RAW would fare better.
All-in-all, considering my poor film-loading "technique" and the fact that I had to crop the image to get similar framing, that's pretty remarkable. Also, I shot at a larger f-stop than I needed to, as the first thing I needed in focus was relatively far away.
Bummer Backstory
After showing that 4x5 transparency and another to friends at a bar/restaurant, I folded a paper towel over them to protect them while we ate, then forgot about them when I went to shoot pool. They were grabbed up along with everything else left on our table and went to he dumpster. Fortunately, I'd scanned in one of them before this happened; and I have slightly less exposed versions of each.
I won't be bringing my transparencies anywhere without a binder from now on. Arg.
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