My Linhof Techno review goes into depth of ground-glass precision and focusing.
Focusing a 3D landscape scene is quite different from focusing say indoor architecture, or focusing straight onto a wall or similar.
Landscape shooting f/11 can surely be done successfully with ground glass, but it is still not for everyone. I have got the sense that Joe Cornish does not really have the pixel-peep sickness like the rest of us . I use a 20x loupe to focus my Techno and then mistakes is very rare when working with an f/11 DoF.
The largest and most damaging myth concerning modern ground glass focusing is that you should not use high magnification loupes because you then only see grain. Quite the opposite, I'd say if you don't use a proper 20x you're not maximizing the potential. With a 20x you do see some grain structure, but that does not mean that you don't see more detail. It's just like looking closely at film -- resolution is considerably higher than the largest grains.
I'd say that the 10x like Joe Cornish uses is too low magnification for safe results, I have the exact same loupe so I have tried it. If you have very good eyes it may work well though, and for scenes when you do tilting (quite frequent in landscape) it is hard to fail.
Ground glass focusing just like manual focusing with MF SLRs is something that requires training and skill, and to some extent good eyes.
It also is a bit dependent on how you look upon focus accuracy. The DoF is generally always too short to have perfect sharpness over the whole frame. Does it really matter exactly where the peak focus is? Focusing on a brick wall it surely does, but in landscape I find that in 90% of the scenes there is a quite big tolerance on focus placement, i e if you happen to miss a bit you're not really making a worse picture.
All this makes us see statements about ground glass ranging from "it is totally impossible" to "it works perfectly every time". There's no absolute truth, it's a personal thing.
Focusing a 3D landscape scene is quite different from focusing say indoor architecture, or focusing straight onto a wall or similar.
Landscape shooting f/11 can surely be done successfully with ground glass, but it is still not for everyone. I have got the sense that Joe Cornish does not really have the pixel-peep sickness like the rest of us . I use a 20x loupe to focus my Techno and then mistakes is very rare when working with an f/11 DoF.
The largest and most damaging myth concerning modern ground glass focusing is that you should not use high magnification loupes because you then only see grain. Quite the opposite, I'd say if you don't use a proper 20x you're not maximizing the potential. With a 20x you do see some grain structure, but that does not mean that you don't see more detail. It's just like looking closely at film -- resolution is considerably higher than the largest grains.
I'd say that the 10x like Joe Cornish uses is too low magnification for safe results, I have the exact same loupe so I have tried it. If you have very good eyes it may work well though, and for scenes when you do tilting (quite frequent in landscape) it is hard to fail.
Ground glass focusing just like manual focusing with MF SLRs is something that requires training and skill, and to some extent good eyes.
It also is a bit dependent on how you look upon focus accuracy. The DoF is generally always too short to have perfect sharpness over the whole frame. Does it really matter exactly where the peak focus is? Focusing on a brick wall it surely does, but in landscape I find that in 90% of the scenes there is a quite big tolerance on focus placement, i e if you happen to miss a bit you're not really making a worse picture.
All this makes us see statements about ground glass ranging from "it is totally impossible" to "it works perfectly every time". There's no absolute truth, it's a personal thing.
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