MorseBlog

Amongst the seemingly endless list of skills and tasks I need to understand and master is the subject of bellows extension compensation. This subject is covered in many places but I can summarize here.  On a camera with any kind of bellows one has to compensate for the extension of the bellows as one gets very close to the subject. Recall that the distance from the lens to the film plane is defined by its focal length when focused on a subject at infinity. (This gets more complicated with the compact retrofocus optical designs of 35mm lenses.) As the subject gets closer to the lens then the lens needs to move farther from the film plane. On large format cameras and many medium format cameras (like the Mamiya C220/330 TLRs) it is possible to extend the bellows very far to get very close to the subject. As the lens moves further from the film plane more of the light falls outside of the film plane. This means a correction of more exposure is required. (A readable paper on the subject...

I sometimes watch Tim Layton's YouTube channel. Tim grows his own flowers and makes very large prints of the flowers; he uses an 8x10 large format camera to capture them and then prints on silver gelatin up to 30x40 inches. The prints look impressive online and must be more so in person. Now I don't have quite so nice a setup but noticed that some gladiolas in bloom in our garden and thought I should give this a shot myself on my 4x5 camera. Tim speands a lot of time getting the lighting setup correctly and while I don't have the dedicated space and background for this I made a small setup in our hall where a skykight two floors up casts a very diffuse light from the ceiling. I wasn't sure if this would be good or not but let's see what results I get! I placed a piece of white card behind the flowers and one underneath to reflect some light upwards as well. The simple lighting setup I used. I already had some pre-loaded Fomapan 100 film in film holders ...