with a Rodenstock Bistigmat (symmetric doublet), this time wide-open at f18. Yes 18, not 16 – its 1895 or so, and the industry standards aren’t that much of a standard yet.
i kept telling myself to get closer, but this is probably not quite close enough yet. this lens is a 30 cm or so, which is a normal lens for the format, but my eyes are kinda used to 50 mm on 35 mm cameras, which is considerably tighter. So it’s very easy to have everything (and thus nothing) on the picture. But this one turned out nicely i think.
The lens doesn’t get much more soft at f18 than it is at f51. this lens is unsharp at every aperture 🙂 what would probably help is adding a filter so that really only blue light comes through. though that might fuzz with the multi-grade-ness of the paper in unexpected ways.
the core problem is that this lens is not color-corrected at all. it was made for emulsions before even the orthochromatic ones came out. So green light doesn’t focus on the same spot as blue light. Red light is off by even more but the paper isn’t sensitive to red light, so that part works out automatically.
18×24 cm field camera, Rodenstock Bistigmat at f18, on Ilford MGRC paper, with a 00 grade filter. i think it was like 3 seconds, at ISO 1.6
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