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Old March 22nd 11, 03:27 PM posted to rec.photo.equipment.large-format
Thor Lancelot Simon
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Default Recommendation Request

In article ,
Cheesehead wrote:
On Mar 21, 10:38*am, erie patsellis wrote:
and if you can't, shoot me an email, I have a spare 19" Artar sitting

here in a barrel.

erie

On 3/13/2011 7:18 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

In

,
*wrote:


If you were to pick a lens from 400 to 500mm, what would you choose?
8x10 coverage with modest movement is adequate.
I prefer something in a shutter& *synced.


19" (480mm) Artar, if you can find one.


Will it mount directly in the Ilex/Acme #4 without modification?


Mine (Goerz, serial #775051) is in a #4 Ilex. It was that way when I
got it. I've never had occasion to take it out of the shutter until
now. I have seen some number of these, however, mounted in #5, and
I vaguely remember hearing something about mounting in #4 presenting
some difficulties. Let me take mine apart and look.

Now that I do, I see it's quite an unusual mount. It appears the
original barrel was cut in two, threads machined on the exterior
of each half, and this was used as an adapter to mount the cells
into the shutter with the correct spacing (which would have required
trimming the barrel halves to account for the space between the front
and back shutter threads).

Since I do not know the original spacing for this lens, it's possible
that the remounting operation left enough of the barrel in place to
effectively re-optimize the lens for infinity rather than its original
optimization. Process lenses in barrel usually shipped optimized for
1:1. I have seen this done with smaller Artars using shims in the
shutter.

However, Richard did some research a few years ago with the old catalogs
and determined that at least for the last few decades they were sold (I
believe) Artars longer than a certain length were in fact optimized for
reproduction ratios other than 1:1 -- IIRC 1:5 to about 1:10 depending
on the length of the lens. So no respacing may be required nor in
fact desired. If I got one of these in barrel, my inclination would
be to reproduce this clever trick of using the barrel as a shutter
thread adapter, but to carefully measure so the total length of the
assembly ended up exactly as it had been before. No point getting it
wrong.

Whatever was done with my Artar when it was mounted, it is *tack* sharp.
It is pretty much my favorite lens. I even shoot it on 4x5 though this
is a bit of an issue as the large shutter does not allow certain
movements on my Wisner -- it bumps into the uprights if I tilt the lens.

--
Thor Lancelot Simon
And now he couldn't remember when this passion had flown, leaving him so
foolish and bewildered and astray: can any man?
William Styron