Still enjoying this little Petzval Projection lens I got from Jim, here it is again on the speedgraphic!  This time I gave some rise to the front standard so that I could move the center of sharpness down onto the tip of the shoe, which made it vignette only on the top.

(edit) oh it looks like it's not showing all of the image.  Here's the direct link to the image, click here.

I was introduced to this site by Stephan Dietrtich when I was looking for Wollensak Verito examples.  Wow!  Finally found a site that reflects my interest. By way of introduction, I'm a computer architect working at nothing really important. 'Nuff said about that. I started off in the music biz as a composer. Got tired of that. Then I found film photography with LF equipment. Much more interesting and rewarding. Although I have sharp lenses in the kit, I've found that the classic lenses work better for me here in the east coast rain forest. Especially in winter when there's less clutter. The challenge of east coast landscape photography is that there's just so much stuff in the way. Grand west-coast visions just aren't available here. Yes, we have mountains (what the west-coasters call foothills), but you need to be in a balloon or a cherry-picker to see them through the brush. Thus, I'm left with pointing into the forest instead of around it and that's where the classic lenses shine. IN the forest, it's all about shape and pattern -- seeing the forest instead of all those trees. Sure, you can get the effect by shaking the camera or just blurring things with bad focus, but it's not the same. Classic lenses, especially portrait lenses, allow one to narrow down the plane of sharp focus just so much better and with more control. Within that plane, petzval formulas will even allow selective focus on the same plane. And, that's just what's needed in the forest. 

Add to that the glow that can be obtained with an old rapid-rectilinear shot wide open, or the graphics effect that happen with a single meniscus and on and on, and the possibilities sometimes become overwhelming. 

And so, I offer some efforts that show where I am in the journey. What I love about this site is that I no longer need to feel cowed by what the 'contemporary' world is doing. Very gratifying to find wide-open to be a more interesting direction.

George

This is in Watchung Reservation, NJ in March 2008. I used a Voigtlander Heliar 300mm at around f/6 with the focus on the lit up tree. It was evening and the sun was just above the horizion.

Light Source

I shot these as an experiment to see how the two lenses would behave.

The tight shot is done with the front element only of a Quick Acting 8 Portrait lens - wide open

and the second shot is the Petzval front barrel married to a Verito Rear barrel with a studio shutter in between. The second shot has a  rather dirty neg :) but it is only at this stage an experiment. 

When i acquired my Verito from Jim he offered me the front and rear barrels to another lens that also used the same studio shutter as the Verito. Naturally for the small additional cost I gladly accepted his kind offer. This image is done with the [I'll call it a Wollensak Series A] Wolly in an attempt to step away from the clinical landscape style I have done in the past. It is a very hard task to use a Petzval like this one in a landscape and not have too much of the radial blur happening in the background. While this lens is a Petzval it is a 9" and on 5x4 the swirlies may not be so prominent as say a 5x7 or 10x8. With the discussion on pictorialism happening on Largeformatphotography I felt inspired to see what would happen with this lens in a ladscape instead of a portrait situation.

Three Flutes

I did some more images with the SW lens.  I usually stear clear of naval gazing but I included some questions that I've been mulling after reading some of what Alvin Langdon Coburn wrote nearly 100 years ago.  The rest of the images are here if you're interested.  Funny thing is I'm not nuts about most of Coburns pictures.

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/Secret%20Weapon%20Lens/More_SW_Lens.html

The lens is the front element from a type of modified petzval that theatres used to use.  It has a big magnification at the front that gives a larger f1.9 aperture number.  Used alone it is just a grossly uncorected doublet that throws a lot of light everywhere.  It focuses at about 7 inches but the defocus happens so fast that you can get a total merge of everything in just a few inches.  It can't "see" to the end of the 3 flutes which was only about 5 or 6 inches from the point of focus.  More techy stuff.  I used Efke 100 film rated at 100.  Exposure with normal overhead kitchen lighting was 1/1.6 sec at an effective f10.  The D200 has that setting so I simply "listened" to the Nikon about 5 or 6 times, practiced with the packard a couple of time, and squeezed the bulb.