Experiment No. 1 - Depth and View

For my first chapter I want to start with an extremely basic, level-setting experiment: how do different settings look with my setup. We all know that 28mm is wide, 135mm is tele, and f/1.4 is wide open, but how does that look on my camera, on my lenses? What character does it imbue on my images? How does the contrast fall off, is the bokeh round or swirly, and how does it all render on my chosen film? (I roll my own film, currently Kentmere 100, but that is several other chapters). I wanted to see 3 things: field of view, depth of field, rendering (sharpness, contrast, bokeh, more artistic components). I set up a scene on the dining room table with my tripod pointing dead center and waited for the sun. I shot all of my lenses at their widest aperature then closed down to f/8, metering the same for all lenses at a given aperture. I chose f/8 as a sort of middle ground for 2 reasons. First, along with f/5.6 it is the standard for middle openness in most modern cameras, and usually gives the best sharpness and contrast; f/8 strikes a good balance between large depth of field without becoming omnifocus. Second, and this is more pragmatic, wide open on my Hektor 135mm is f/4.5, so using f/5.6 would give less than a stop of difference between wide and middle. Finally, I developed in XTOL using stock replenishment (another chapter) and scanned and processed myself (are you sensing a theme?). Notes 28mm (Brightin Star XSLIM PRO-M) f/ 2.8 - quite a clean image but not super sharp anywhere; decent contrast at f/ 8 but no real test wide open 35mm (Voigtlander Nokton SC) f/ 1.4 - Cleaner and sharper than the 28mm but not pin sharp. But that might be the film or the photographer. Gentle fall of and a smooth out of focus area, pushes attention to the in focus but not distracting. 40mm (Voigtlander Nokton Classic) f/ 1.4 - Sharper, probably the photographer since the lenses are very similar. same smooth out-of-focus area and neither loses much contrast open. 50mm (Canon - LTM) f/ 1.8 - Might be the sharpest but might have a smaller depth of field at f/ 8. Very shallow wide open with smooth fall off. 90mm (Leica Elmar - Collapsible) f/ 4 - Beautiful lens, impressive depth of field at f/ 8 135mm (Leica Hektor) f/ 4.5 - Smaller dynamic range wide open which is a little surprising… wide open is f/ 4.5. f/8 is nice tho. The first image shot with the 28mm (f/ 8) was a little premature; as such, only the right third of the image is visible. This is a lens that I’m more likely to use at f/8 or up this lens has a lot of unusual character so I'm not particularly concerned but it would have been nice to be complete. I also underexposed the f/8 shot on the 90mm; I was able to recover in post but it is a little visible. I intentionally left camera, development, and scanning artifacts in the images; normally I use content-aware fill to remove spots and such but I want these images to serve as an example of the raw product of my process. Besides cropping, no touch-ups were applied individually to the images, I used Negative Lab Pro to convert and did them in the same pass so it would treat them the same. Also, while I did meter for each aperture, I kept that speed for any other lens that had the same aperture instead of re-metering each shot. I was trying to move as quickly as possible to minimize sun travel and make sure I didn’t lose my cloud window. This was probably the wrong decision and led to a little variation in the images as the light changed. I learned that my lenses are pretty good at rendering images I like the look of. They have character but it doesn’t take over. None had significant loss of contrast wide open (maybe the 135mm) and no distortion to speak of. My middle distance lenses (35-50mm) are strong open to close and the wide and long lenses hold their own wide although they definitely perform better stopped down. Did this experiment produce any new knowledge? no. Was it particularly interesting? not really. But it set a baseline I can work off of now. I have a slightly better sense of how my lenses perform with examples I can reference. For my next trick, I’ll try the same shot (maybe this same setup?) over and over to test different developer treatments. I’m thinking XTOL (replenished and 1+?) vs Rodinal (1+25 and stand 1+100). I’ll probably also alternate exposures +1,0,-1,0… so i can also see how it handles over and under exposure. l8r sk8rs