This is a subject that has been beaten nearly to death but I do something a little different than most people so I thought I'd show it off for the few people it might appeal to. I like to precalculate compensation in 1/3-stop increments and tape a little table onto the lensboard of each lens. That way it's always there with no thinking of fumbling. I just need to measure (either a tape measure or my hand-span is 8 inches almost exactly) the bellows I have out and look it up on the table.
I use this graphing utility to make the calculations faster.
f=focal length
b=bellows compensation in stops
The graph will read out a bellows measurement in inches. If you want bellows in mm, remove the "/25.4" from the equation. If you want bellows in cm, replace the "25.4" with "10."
When I get a new lens, I use that utility to create a little table in excel that will get taped to my lensboard. The formatting will be ugly but my table for my 305mm g-claron, for example, goes:
305 mm
1/3 13-1/2 in
2/3 15-1/4 in
1 stop 17 in
1-1/3 19 in
1-2/3 21-1/2 in
2 stop 24 in
2-1/3 27 in
2-2/3 30-1/4 in
3 stop 34 in
3-1/3 38 in
3-2/3 42-3/4 in
4 stop 48 in
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