It has been years since I used a view camera. Now I am using a Cambo with a Aptus 75. I have been doing stitches of Cityscapes and Landscapes using back movements.
The problem I find is that when I use rising back I lose focus. In the old days with film I never stitched and would always check focus after using any movements and adjust so this was not an issue. Now with stitching I set up the shot and then move the back into place. I need to work quickly of course what with clouds moving and light changing so it is not practical to refocus for every stitch movement. I don't get why the focus shifts at all to be honest. It is just a rising and drop that causes it and only when the front and back standards are not parallel.
Martin
I also use the Cambo Ultima for this very same situation, however as yet I do not own an MFDB, but do this with the Nikon D3 for now and have had great success in the studio as well as on location with landscapes. So you should be able to pull this off with your Aptus as well.
The first thing I would check if you have not done so already is to just make sure the chip plane is being accurately focused in the first place. The rear standard or block has 3 small set screws to allow fore and aft adjustments on different backs to accommodate differences in manufacturers tolerances. So try focusing on something such as a brick wall with lens wide open in a controlled situation first to make sure you are getting accurate flat plane focus. One thing I have found using this system is that focus really does become hyper critical. With my own Ultima I constantly have to tilt the front standard forward just a hair to obtain accurate corner to corner flat plane focus such as photographing a painting.
Once you have that dialed in then proceed to stitched images but with a slightly different technique than you were used to when photographing with large sheet film. The way I have done this once a scene is setup is to shift upwards the rear standard as far as the scene requires with the correct amount of forward tilt to bring foreground into focus, then drop the rear standard down as far as needed again to check focus for distant objects. It might take a few iterations before you get it right and often I just take a guess at the degrees I think will be needed for correct foreground to infinity focus and make minute adjustments from there. At first it can be frustrating for sure but once you get the hang of it should go fairly quickly with time. The point is you can't just use the one "centered" frame for your focus because you have no idea until shifting up or down where those tilts will play out on the larger film or "chip plane".
I used my backyard for practice dozens of times earlier in the year to reduced the frustration factor once actually in the field. It made a huge difference.
Normally I would not post a non MFDB image on this forum but in this case just for illustration I am showing one image from the D3/Cambo Ultima setup using a Rodenstock 105mm Digital lens with 9 frames stitched, 3 rows and 3 columns, with only the rear movement of the D3. I have printed this image 24x36 and it looked amazingly good even much better than I would have guessed. The final edited 8 bit file size was 150 mb.
Hope this helps.
