LF is problematic and frustrating in many ways. Rather than necessarily giving up all of photography my two cents worth of a suggestion would be to shoot medium format or 35mm. In my experience, most people do better work with smaller formats anyway, and the smaller formats remove certain aggravating things about LF, in particular certain aspects of camera operation, dust, and film development issues. You can also go digital, which affords even greater flexibility in image editing.
I can't remember the last time I made a LF exposure shorter than a second, and most are much longer so shutter accuracy is basically a non issue for me. I don't buy used equipment so I kind of just assume my shutters are decent shape. When they stop working I'll just go digital I guess.
"Landscapes exist in the material world yet soar in the realms of the spirit..." Tsung Ping, 5th Century China
Up in the redwoods, they square up everything after they've cut the tree down. I happen prefer the natural look over the stacked lumberyard look. But the owner of the lumberyard made a helluva lot more money that way than I ever did selling pictures of the woods.
Drew Bedo
www.quietlightphoto.com
http://www.artsyhome.com/author/drew-bedo
There are only three types of mounting flanges; too big, too small and wrong thread!
The nice thing about photography is the 'product' shows all and answers all questions; just look at the print.So how close is close enough?
Consistent practice is important in any respect.
Nothing betters uber quality studio electronic strobe (Bronocolor, Elinchrome, Comet and etc) for consistent, reliable, dependable source of high power, high quality light source for color work. Achieving 1/10 f-stop with near absolute stable color temperature per exposure is not that difficult. Arri makes GOOD true 5000K constant light sources, as does Mole-Richardson for tungsten and others. Light sources can be "gel" filtered to adjust color temperature and color rendition as needed. Coupled with an in camera metering system like Sinar Expolux works good to control exposure, compensate for bellows factor and all those potential small sources of exposure error. These days, it would be surprising if this is done much at all these days for color transparency film images.
1/10 f-stop needed, depends. For uber quality color transparency images that is a nice luxury. More often than not 1/3" f-stop is ok enough. Negative films can tolerate 1/2 f-stop mostly easy.
For outdoor color images, the color temperature and intensity varies LOTs over the course of a given day. Give up trying to achieve what can be done using highly controlled studio environment. Knowing this, shutter accuracy, shutter repeatability can be a variable as much as actual light transmission from the front element of the lens to film. What has worked good for ~me~ single Sinar shutter (yes, Drew despises this approach) with barrel lenses where possible. Single quality, reliable-consistent-accurate shutter can greatly reduce exposure variations due to shutter variations. It works good, been doing it this way for decades without fail. Exceptions to this would be modern wide angle lenses. This is why I've essentially given up on using lenses in shutter with some exceptions (modern wide angle lenses) decades ago. And no, this solution-method can never work for all view camera image makers.
Bernice
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