Movements with telephoto

[Ed Richards]

I have a 400mm telephoto lens for 4x5. Got it to use with my Technika, because of bellows limits. Tried to use some tilt to align my plane of focus with the ground for a long shoot of grave stones. Had a bit of trouble having to realign because of the off center nodal points. Any tips on using movements with a telephoto? Now that I have a monorail as well, I could use a regular long lens, but the long bellows extension becomes a real wind amplifier, so I would like to stick with the tele.

[naturephoto1]

Hi Ed,

It may be easier to work with back tilts instead of front tilts as long as changing the shape of the subject is not an issue.

Rich

[David A. Goldfarb]

If you use front forward tilt, you'll need some rise usually, so you could offset that a bit by applying some front rise before tilting and then adjusting after, or as Rich suggests, try a rear tilt, if it won't produce too much distortion.

[Leonard Evens]

If you don't insist on seeing what happens as you tilt, there should be no problem. You can always get back to where you need to be by a combination of rise/fall and refocusing. Forget for the moment how things are connected together and try to visualize the lens plane and the film plane as free floating in space. As long as you get them in the right relation to each other, it doesn't matter how you went about doing it.

To this end, the near-far method should work fine. Let me review it. After you have decided where you want the exact plane of focus to go, choose a near point and a far point in it. Make a guess at the appropriate tilt, e.g. 5 degrees if you can't think of anything better. Focus on the far point, with a rise or fall to reframe the subject as you want it. Now focus on the near point. If you had to increase the distance between the standards to do that, increase the tilt. If you had to decrease the distance between the standards to do that, decrease the tilt. A few iterations should get you where you want to be.

[David Millard]

Thank you Leonard. I use a 270mm telephoto on a 23 Technika, and spend more time fiddling with the plane of focus than I should. I appreciate your rational presentation of the order of operations.

Regards,
David