… and which lenses?
The typical lens grouping for large format is 90, 150 210 with a possible 72 and 300 at either end depending on your preference. Being a stubborn, non-conformist fool, I decided I’d like to work out a completely different grouping for myself. I also wanted to work out my own equivalent focal lengths as the standard multiply by three or four figures seemed odd to me.
So we’ll start with an equivalent focal length for a sample 24mm lens (for 35mm film). In my mind, when I take a photograph on 35mm and then crop to 4×5 ratio, this gives me a foundation for my equivalence. So, with width of my 4×5 cropped 35mm film is 24mm (35mm being 24mmx36mm). The with of a large format film is 4 inches or 4×25.6mm which is 102.4mm. Now this gives me a ratio of 24 to 102.4 as my EFL multiplier which is 4.267 or 0.234 depending on which way you want to work.
So lets look at a few 35mm lenses and see what equivalents we get:-
14 = 60
19 = 81
24 = 102
28 = 119
35 = 149
50 = 213
85 = 363
These seem like sensible equivalents to me. The next step is to work out what spacing of lens sizes I would like. Well I do like the 18-28 region and the standard spacing between 90-150-210 works out as about roughly 40% difference between steps.
Having a look at the lenses available and which lenses have a great reputation, I quickly found that the Rodenstock 150mm Sironar S is universally acclaimed as a large format standard. If we work with this as a starting point and work 40% down, we get to 107mm. This corresponds with a very highly acclaimed Schneider lens, the 110XL Super Symmar. 40% down again and we get 78mm which corresponds with the matching Super Symmar XL of 80mm.
Given these three lenses, I felt they gave a good, wide angle biased lens selection (Albeit at somewhat of a hefty price, at least for the Symmars). The 35mm equivalents for these focal lengths, 80-110-150 are 20mm, 27mm and 37mm which seem to give me a better landscape bias than 90-150-210 equivalents of 22mm, 37mm, 52mm. The bonus of the two Symmars is that they also share the same centre filter size.
At the longer end, I have been recommended the 240 Fujinon A and the 300 Nikkor but in the short term, three lenses is more than enough to worry about.
I messed up these plans a little by finding a very cheap Schneider Symmar S 210 on EBay for 100 pounds which I bought so that when I get the camera I will have at least one lens to test it with. This lens arrived in good condition and seems optically sound.
The main worry I had about the above lens combination were the light falloff of the Symmars in comparison to the Super Angulons (which do clever stuff with pupil size to help with falloff) and also the reputation of the 80mm as being too soft wide open to focus. I have been told that the 80mm softness was a production issue in early lenses and that a new 80mm should not show any difficulty in focusing.
