Yes. The Graflex Speed Graphic 4x5 I used at the Photo Staff when I was in high school had a typical Wollensak Raptor 135mm f/4.7 lens, about the EFoV equivalent of a 35 or 40 mm lens on a 35mm FF camera. One of the challenges was getting the focus and focus zone right because you had so little DoF to work with.
With the lens wide open (to get enough shutter speed for basketball) and the focus set to 15' (a typical basketball shot distance at the basket), you had about three and a half feet of DoF total. In 35mm with the Nikon F, that would take a 35mm f/1 lens, wide open, at the same focus distance. I certainly didn't have any 35mm f/1 lenses in my bag in 1971… :-) The Graflex Speed Graphic was designed for fast operation and press work, with a fast focal plane body-shutter and in-lens leaf shutter, and few lens movements … I seem to recall you could shift the lens upwards a bit, but no tilts or swings. The Crown Graphic, designed for a more leisurely pace of operation, included more movements (drop-bed for both up and down lens shifts, front element tilt, etc) but no body-shutter. My Hasselblad 500CM (6x6cm format) camera fitted with Sonnar 150mm f/4 lens (approximate 85mm equivalent) is an almost perfect portrait setup. At typical 6 to 8 foot portrait distance, you need to stop it down to f/8 in order to get the 5-6 inches of DoF needed for earlobe to nose sharpness in a head and shoulder portrait. With a 35mm camera, you achieve that with an 85mm lens by about f/4. So you can see the dynamics of format influence are very profound. Just sticking a lot of megapixels onto a tiny chip wafer does not net a large format camera view of the world. For my needs with a 35mm FF format camera, 24 MPixels are enough … More is occasionally nice, but mostly unnecessary. And no 35mm FF format camera supplants the Hasselblad 500 or SWC in terms of overall image dynamics … they're just too different. Godfrey > On Oct 18, 2015, at 12:01 PM, P.J. Alling <[email protected]> wrote: > > Depends on the focal length of the lens and aperture and film format. But > yes even with relatively slow lenses you can have very shallow DOF even on > large format. > > A not uncommon lens for portraits with medium format would be something like > 210mm with a maximum aperture of f6.7. At a distance of 7 feet, DOF would be > about between 4 and 5 inches, wide open. The equivalent of that on 35mm > would be a 55mm which at 7 feet would have a DOF of between 4 and 5 inches at > f1.4. > > On 10/18/2015 1:15 PM, Larry Colen wrote: >> >> >> Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: >>> Larger formats bring other things to the table beyond resolution. You'll >>> never get the imaging characteristics of a banquet camera by stuffing more >>> bazillion pixels into a 35mm format sensor. >> >> Does the speed graphic really have that shallow of a depth of field wide >> open? Or does it also have some tilt capacity which narrows the depth of >> field even more? -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
