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High altitude confusion vs. compositioning

Lars

Active member
Whenever I'm at high altitude I am running into serious trouble WRT composition and framing. While everything looks good up there, evaluating my captures afterwards has more than once been a disappointment.

Most recently at Patriach Grove in the White mountains (about 3,600 m), I shot some Bristlecone Pines on 8x10 slide film. Needless to say, with that format every exposure has to count. I exposed six sheets, I think only one was interesting.

Further back... in northern Chile a few years ago I once went to the caldera of Sairecabur at 5,530 m, but at least I was acclimatized then. Still, the images were flat and uninteresting.

Anybody else have the same experience?

Lars

Below: The subjectively good one... Cooke XVa wide open at 24" (front element) on old stock Velvia RVP.
 
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carstenw

Active member
Old thread, found it in a search for XVa. Gorgeous shot, tones, contrast, colour. Interesting framing too. Only the shadow in the bottom left disturbs me a little.

How do you find the XVa to work with, and the results?
 

Lars

Active member
Hi Carsten,
Yeah the bottom left shadow is from the camera, there was no way to avoid it as the sun was dropping fast. I planned to crop it out, what you see above is the uncropped film.

About the Cooke XVa, let's see... all brass, quite heavy. Almost a kilo with shutter. Next thing to notice is the multicoating, sometimes I wonder if the glass elements fell out, there's so little reflections.

As you can see from the photo above there is some falloff wide open which goes away stopped down a bit. Resolving power and microcontrast is good enough for my drumscanner at 2000 ppi - 320 megapixels. My Apo-Ronar 480 that I sold to Jack a few years ago was even sharper (that's the sharpest lens I ever used. Almost matched my 35mm Nikon slides under a loupe, with a 400 mm image circle). Overall image contrast is moderate - more like Rodenstock than Schneider. Bokeh is neutral - solid round background highlights wide open. Color rendering seems neutral, as far as I can tell. (Doesn't matter so much in landscape work compared to repro and product shooting.)

Using the lens in the field takes some getting used to - juggling lens elements, and remembering to set the correct aperture scale. Once past that, it's like any other LF lens.
 
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carstenw

Active member
From your description, I get the feeling that the lens is competent, and you like it, but aren't in love with it. Is that accurate?
 

Lars

Active member
I don't fall in love with equipment. It's all tools. You buy them, use them, replace them when they are worn out.

That said, the XVa is an exception. I believe the XVa might be one of the finest large format lenses you can buy, along with the Cooke 945 portrait lens.
 
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