Close up with 4x5

As surprising as it may seem I have not yet done any close up work with my large format camera. Perhaps all the 'bellows factor' calculation has put me off at a subconscious level.

Well, I had some fresh flowers handy last weekend, and thought "why not".

So with the digital camera as a light meter and Bob Wheelers VadeMecum as my guide for correcting for bellows factor I took this image.

I used my 90mm lens and the image is nearly 1:1 (meaning that 1cm of flower will appear as 1cm of negative). I am really quite surprised how well the 90mm (a wide angle) performs in close up. Not only is the angle of view better than what I get using a smaller format (such as the digital) but the depth of field is good too. All in all its come up rather well I think.

As well as the wonderful tonality seen here, there was significant detail available from the image too.

I thought I'd include a segment of a scan from the film done at only 600 dpi (click it to see that sized on your screen properly) to give you an idea what's visible in the image. I've inspected the negative at x10 and found that its quite sharp, probably supporting scans at 3000 dpi. Sadly my scanner runs out of grunt at about 1800dpi so I'd need to pay for that ;-)



This would allow you to make a print about 1.2 m high if one wanted to print something as big as that! You can click on either of these images to see them a little bigger :-)