Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: Neil Williams on January 25, 2018, 11:26:47 pm
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guys
I’m going to have my family over this afternoon and plan to do a few family portraits using my Chamonix 4x5. The Lens I plan to use is my 210mm f5.6 and initially thought about shooting it at f5.6 and seeing as the location will be back lit just let the background blow out. What are your thoughts on family portraits f5.6 or f45
Neil
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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To be honest this is the thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cpULFQ13pI) that you should be concentrating on.
Best wishes,
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What exactly is the family portrait you have in mind? How many people? One, two or three rows? How far you have to stand to get them all in? At 5.6 and say 5 feet distance, your depth of field is very thin, about 2 inches.
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Not only would a 210 not give much depth of field at 5.6 the quality would generally be poor overall. Large format lenses have a maximum aperture designed to allow comfortable viewing on a ground glass so you can focus and compose, not neccesarly to shoot with. Of course you may like the character you get wide open but that’s a whole other thing. The modern obsession with bokeh and shallow depth of field wasn’t such a big deal when large format cameras were common.
There was a f64 club. Not an f1.2 club.
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f16?
Cheers,
Bernard
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I generally shoot a lens of that length (on 4x5) at f11 or f16 for portraits.
Kent in SD