The Better Light of Legends
Jul. 19th, 2006 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitchI know I've been prodded for doing more talking about this stuff than actually shooting photos, but I have finally got my hands on the kit, so here's an initial report after about 3 hours of fiddling around.
Well, my second-hand Cambo Legend view camera showed up today. I got home to find three large boxes on my doorstep, one of which contained an old (and huge) tripod, which turns out to be easily solid enough for the Cambo (I suspect it's probably intended for something even heavier, doG only knows what). Another contained some of the old and cheap Bronica stuff I found on LJ (I'll leave that for a future post because it's not really usable yet), and a third, rather heavy box contained the Cambo, in pieces individually wrapped in vast quantities of bubble wrap.
It was like Christmas, or being given a really intricate 3D puzzle with no instructions. Or both. Anyway, I sat and stared at the bits-of-camera for a while, and eventually worked out which bits went where. I started by attaching the tripod mount to the monorail, which was easy enough. Then the standards, which was fiddly because they are very heavy. Then the bellows, which turned out to be rather simpler than expected. Then, the ground glass holder with the rotating back (very impressive bit of mechanism that), and I was nearly good to go. All I needed was a lens. I have a lens wrench on order, which is basically a special tool for assembling and disassembling large format lenses, but it hadn't arrived yet. That meant that the 150mm Nikkor, which is currently in a Linhof Technika board wasn't usable, because I couldn't free up the lens with the minimal tools I had to hand. However, the 210mm Caltar is basically new and wasn't attached to a lens board, so it was easy enough to mount it. Basically, the lens screws apart into two halves, a ring then screws off the front half, you then poke that bit through the hole in the lens board, reattach the ring from the other side and tighten it down (tricky with the wrong tools), then the back half of the lens screws back on again.
I then fitted the lens board to the front standard, opened the aperture and the shutter fully, and started having a fiddle around. It turned out that the Cambo is extremely easy to use and very precise, partly due to it having geared movements for almost everything (the only exception being tilt). You do a quick rough initial focus by undoing the clamp on one or other of the standards, then manually moving the whole standard backwards and forwards until you get close. You then lock that down, and a shorter range, rack and pinion geared focus drive takes over. This is very precise, and makes it relatively easy to get good focus.
I picked up a compendium shade for the camera from the same seller on eBay. This turned out to be an extremely good move, because it has a universal filter holder for square filters that winds in and out. This makes for an extremely convenient way to mount the IR filter (Better Light sensors don't have an IR filter, so you have to use one in front of or behind the lens).
In all, the camera is old and a bit and ratty (I can't expect much really, given it's loooooow price), but it actually works pretty much perfectly.
Anyway, next step was getting the Better Light scan back up and running. This was a little tricky, because I bought one of their (slightly) older models second hand, which uses a SCSI interface to a tethered host PC. First step was installing the SCSI drivers for the SCSI PCMCIA card that the seller nicely threw in with the deal. This was easy enough. Reboot, install Better Light software, can't see camera. Grump. Actually reading the release notes indicated that I also needed to get ASPI drivers from Adaptec and install them. 3 reboots later (1 of which due to my not reading *their* install notes properly, mea culpa), and I had it running. Annoyingly, by this time, the sun had gone down and it was considerably dark, so I had to find things to point it at inside the flat. View cameras in general, and the Better Light in particular, aren't very fond of low light conditions. It makes using the ground glass screen very difficult, and image quality is compromised (as it is with film, of course). So I decided to take a photo of the lamp shade in my dining room:
The original is roughly 5000x5000 pixels, actually 75 megapixels due to not using a Bayer pattern in the sensor (i.e. each pixel has a proper R, G and B without interpolation). The back will go to 6000 x 8000 without difficulty, but it is convenient to crop at the time of shooting, because of the reduction in scan time and file size that results. The following image is a 1:1 crop from the area near the ceiling rose:
Neither image has had any sharpening applied whatsoever -- they are basically exactly as they came out of the camera software, all I did was rescale and crop them respectively. For reference, this was a 210mm Caltar at about f11, with a line time of 1/60th of a second and an ASA rating of about 400.
Anyway, like I said, I couldn't play with the 150mm Nikkor, so I decided to have a go with the moderately exotic Super Angulon XL 47mm. Note that 47mm on the 5x4 format is WIDE. As in monstrously wide.
The less than ideal result was that the Cambo can't quite focus at infinity with that lens. It is astonishingly close, probably less than a millimetre out, but no cigar. This is using a bag bellows, not the original bellows. However, I did discover a bodge. The standards on the Cambo use exactly the same mounts for the bellows as they do for the back and the lens panels. So this let me do a bit of a cunning trick. I took the back standard off the monorail, turned it through 180 degress, then put it back on again. The bag bellows reattached easily, but the ground glass/back assembly didn't really want to fit properly, but I did find that it would just about work in the vertical position. The ground glass didn't quite spring back to the correct position, so focussing that way is out, but the Better Light went in perfectly. I was able to use the prescan facility to compose the shot, and the Better Light's focus meter to perform accurate focussing. This worked fine, although the compendium bellows did cause bad vignetting. I couldn't be arsed to mess around fitting the filter to the back of the lens with a rubber band (the usual trick, apparently!), so I lived with the vignette and cropped to about 40% of the image size. This was OK, but obviously isn't going to show of the lenses extraordinary wideness. Nevertheless, it is pretty damned wide even in this configuration:
The above shot is my (currently empty) dining room, as shot with the 47mm Super Angulon, roughly 50 megapixels, f11, line time of 1/12th sec, approx 2000 ASA. On the full size version, there is a huge amount of detail. The following image is a 100% crop of the door handle area. Again, no sharpening has been carried out. The vast ASA setting did cause a bit of noise in the shadow area as you might expect, but probably no more than you'd get with a DSLR at about 400 or maybe 800. This is partly an advantage of large format and big, 12 micron geometry pixels.
So, it works. If I get up early enough in the morning, I'll haul it onto my balcony and attempt to shoot a street scene. Failing that, I'll do it tomorrow evening if I'm home early enough.
Well, my second-hand Cambo Legend view camera showed up today. I got home to find three large boxes on my doorstep, one of which contained an old (and huge) tripod, which turns out to be easily solid enough for the Cambo (I suspect it's probably intended for something even heavier, doG only knows what). Another contained some of the old and cheap Bronica stuff I found on LJ (I'll leave that for a future post because it's not really usable yet), and a third, rather heavy box contained the Cambo, in pieces individually wrapped in vast quantities of bubble wrap.
It was like Christmas, or being given a really intricate 3D puzzle with no instructions. Or both. Anyway, I sat and stared at the bits-of-camera for a while, and eventually worked out which bits went where. I started by attaching the tripod mount to the monorail, which was easy enough. Then the standards, which was fiddly because they are very heavy. Then the bellows, which turned out to be rather simpler than expected. Then, the ground glass holder with the rotating back (very impressive bit of mechanism that), and I was nearly good to go. All I needed was a lens. I have a lens wrench on order, which is basically a special tool for assembling and disassembling large format lenses, but it hadn't arrived yet. That meant that the 150mm Nikkor, which is currently in a Linhof Technika board wasn't usable, because I couldn't free up the lens with the minimal tools I had to hand. However, the 210mm Caltar is basically new and wasn't attached to a lens board, so it was easy enough to mount it. Basically, the lens screws apart into two halves, a ring then screws off the front half, you then poke that bit through the hole in the lens board, reattach the ring from the other side and tighten it down (tricky with the wrong tools), then the back half of the lens screws back on again.
I then fitted the lens board to the front standard, opened the aperture and the shutter fully, and started having a fiddle around. It turned out that the Cambo is extremely easy to use and very precise, partly due to it having geared movements for almost everything (the only exception being tilt). You do a quick rough initial focus by undoing the clamp on one or other of the standards, then manually moving the whole standard backwards and forwards until you get close. You then lock that down, and a shorter range, rack and pinion geared focus drive takes over. This is very precise, and makes it relatively easy to get good focus.
I picked up a compendium shade for the camera from the same seller on eBay. This turned out to be an extremely good move, because it has a universal filter holder for square filters that winds in and out. This makes for an extremely convenient way to mount the IR filter (Better Light sensors don't have an IR filter, so you have to use one in front of or behind the lens).
In all, the camera is old and a bit and ratty (I can't expect much really, given it's loooooow price), but it actually works pretty much perfectly.
Anyway, next step was getting the Better Light scan back up and running. This was a little tricky, because I bought one of their (slightly) older models second hand, which uses a SCSI interface to a tethered host PC. First step was installing the SCSI drivers for the SCSI PCMCIA card that the seller nicely threw in with the deal. This was easy enough. Reboot, install Better Light software, can't see camera. Grump. Actually reading the release notes indicated that I also needed to get ASPI drivers from Adaptec and install them. 3 reboots later (1 of which due to my not reading *their* install notes properly, mea culpa), and I had it running. Annoyingly, by this time, the sun had gone down and it was considerably dark, so I had to find things to point it at inside the flat. View cameras in general, and the Better Light in particular, aren't very fond of low light conditions. It makes using the ground glass screen very difficult, and image quality is compromised (as it is with film, of course). So I decided to take a photo of the lamp shade in my dining room:
The original is roughly 5000x5000 pixels, actually 75 megapixels due to not using a Bayer pattern in the sensor (i.e. each pixel has a proper R, G and B without interpolation). The back will go to 6000 x 8000 without difficulty, but it is convenient to crop at the time of shooting, because of the reduction in scan time and file size that results. The following image is a 1:1 crop from the area near the ceiling rose:
Neither image has had any sharpening applied whatsoever -- they are basically exactly as they came out of the camera software, all I did was rescale and crop them respectively. For reference, this was a 210mm Caltar at about f11, with a line time of 1/60th of a second and an ASA rating of about 400.
Anyway, like I said, I couldn't play with the 150mm Nikkor, so I decided to have a go with the moderately exotic Super Angulon XL 47mm. Note that 47mm on the 5x4 format is WIDE. As in monstrously wide.
The less than ideal result was that the Cambo can't quite focus at infinity with that lens. It is astonishingly close, probably less than a millimetre out, but no cigar. This is using a bag bellows, not the original bellows. However, I did discover a bodge. The standards on the Cambo use exactly the same mounts for the bellows as they do for the back and the lens panels. So this let me do a bit of a cunning trick. I took the back standard off the monorail, turned it through 180 degress, then put it back on again. The bag bellows reattached easily, but the ground glass/back assembly didn't really want to fit properly, but I did find that it would just about work in the vertical position. The ground glass didn't quite spring back to the correct position, so focussing that way is out, but the Better Light went in perfectly. I was able to use the prescan facility to compose the shot, and the Better Light's focus meter to perform accurate focussing. This worked fine, although the compendium bellows did cause bad vignetting. I couldn't be arsed to mess around fitting the filter to the back of the lens with a rubber band (the usual trick, apparently!), so I lived with the vignette and cropped to about 40% of the image size. This was OK, but obviously isn't going to show of the lenses extraordinary wideness. Nevertheless, it is pretty damned wide even in this configuration:
The above shot is my (currently empty) dining room, as shot with the 47mm Super Angulon, roughly 50 megapixels, f11, line time of 1/12th sec, approx 2000 ASA. On the full size version, there is a huge amount of detail. The following image is a 100% crop of the door handle area. Again, no sharpening has been carried out. The vast ASA setting did cause a bit of noise in the shadow area as you might expect, but probably no more than you'd get with a DSLR at about 400 or maybe 800. This is partly an advantage of large format and big, 12 micron geometry pixels.
So, it works. If I get up early enough in the morning, I'll haul it onto my balcony and attempt to shoot a street scene. Failing that, I'll do it tomorrow evening if I'm home early enough.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 10:43 am (UTC)Your lampshade needs dusting though. :-p
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 11:01 am (UTC)I can't wait to see what you can get from this outdoors.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 08:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-20 03:14 pm (UTC)