Hello! I'm the newb who posted about the Dallmeyer Pentac 8" in the other thread. I'm a wedding photographer now mostly unemployed due to COVID, and I'm looking to branch out into high-end portraiture. I also shoot landscapes and I've been doing okay with selling prints this year. I'm hoping these two endeavors could compensate some of the lost wedding income. I'm a very experienced photog, but when it comes to large format I have no idea what I'm doing.

It seems that the portraits I'm most drawn to are shot with the Aero Ektar on a Speed Graphic. The Pentac was an attempt to get something similar relatively cheaply. My Speed Graphic arrives today, but I've since learned that it's incompatible with the lens board (JoLo) I planned to use. So now I'm kinda back to square one.

It occurs to me that if I found some interesting character lenses in shutters, I could just use a plain ol' field camera for the portraits as well as the landscapes, thereby killing two birds with one stone. I would have been using the SG/Pentac on a tripod, anyway, and focusing on the ground glass. The idea of being able to use something remotely modern on paid gigs is comforting, especially since there are already many opportunities for error for a LF newb like me. Not sure I trust the SG focal plane shutter. Are there lenses out there that could work for this? I'm not finding a great deal of info, and it seems like most lenses top out at f/4.5, if that. Using Flickr as my main source of research.

I'd appreciate any guidance y'all can give. Thanks in advance for your wisdom!