I rek'n you ain't been reading rec.photo.largeformat, Mike. I
have it on good authority that them old press camera lens cain't
make a good 8x10 from a 4x5 negative. And if you stop them down
defractions jus' distroys the image to unusability. If'n it
war't true they would'n post it thar.
--Tom (who doesn't usually blame the lens when he screws up the
picture).
Mike Johnston wrote:
>
> Bob wrote:
>
> > Don't recall where I read it, but I know I did read somewhere that
> > Weston never had a great lens. Old, uncoated, etc. Wonder if he would
> > have done better with the latest, best glass?
>
> Actually, I personally believe that the "cult of the good lens" evolved in
> parallel with the continual reduction in negative size. Some of the sharpest
> pictures you'll ever see are Carleton Watkins's mammoth glass-plate albumen
> contact prints, made in the third to fourth quarter of the 1800s. I've
> almost never seen an 8x10 contact print that would make me want to say "not
> a sharp enough lens." Large-format photographers have never argued over lens
> quality or sharpness nearly as much as small-format photographers, either in
> history or today. It tends to be when you take a tiny little postage stamp
> of film and enlarge it to ten diameters or more than you really start to
> care about things like grain morphology and the signatures of lens
> aberrations.
>
> What's probably true is that lenses simply can't be sharp enough for 12X
> enlargements. I also think it's true that 35mm is actually a subminiature
> format--it's just too small to be really practical from a technical quality
> standpoint. It's still better than any other alternative, principally
> because the next biggest size of film is that dopey cartridgeless
> paper-backed 120 which was benighted from the beginning. But if we were
> concerned only with striking a the best balance between image quality and
> shooting convenience, we could design a new film format that would have it
> all over 35mm. It would be cartridge-loading with a horizontal path and have
> sprockets only along one edge; it would have a stubbier aspect ratio than
> 35mm's 2:3, say 5:7; and it would be maybe just a little bigger than 645
> overall. It would be quite practical from a shooting standpoint given
> today's miniaturization in camera design.
>
> I think with a negative of that size and today's films, that would be
> enough. Enlargement magnification needed would be just that much less, the
> information recorded in the film would be just that much more, and the
> system wouldn't strain the lens's capability as much. The constant furor
> over lens quality would quietly subside and go away.
>
> That's just a guess, of course, but it's...an educated guess. <s>
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