From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 03/25/01-08:54:57 AM Z
> However, when sharpness is the only issue (and Carl Weese may take issue
> with me on this) I see little difference prints made from my 6x9 negatives
> exposed with a Fuji GSWIII 6x9 camera and enlarged to 12X18, with contact
> prints made directly form 12X20 negatives.
Sandy,
"when sharpness is the only issue" I have no argument with that at all. It's
just that 'sharpness' is the most over-rated and unimportant of all
technical aspects of successful photographs. Enlargements can be plenty
sharp enough, but that never lets them look like contact prints. This
reminds me of people who want you to look at a digital print with a loupe to
prove it doesn't look digital, when of course it _screams_ digital from
across the room because the overuse of unsharp masking has replaced the
original character of the camera lens with a completely non-optical image
character.
BTW, are most of your Fuji 6x9 negs made on a tripod with the lens stopped
down? Fuji lenses tend to be fine when used in a way that achieves
pan-focus, but when they are used for selective focus work the out of focus
areas tend to be truly awful (this is what the Japanese call bokeh, bad
bokeh in the case of most Fuji lenses). The new Hasselblad panoramic 35 has
this problem because it uses Fuji lenses. I own two large format Fuji lenses
and they do great for landscapes at f/32 but I find them unuseable for
close-ups where some picture areas will be rendered out of focus.---Carl
PS: Not sure if this is relevant or not, but I like either lots of
enlargement, or none at all. I do all my large format work by contact
printing. I almost always enlarge my small format work a lot--8x12 at least
and I'm more fond of 12x18. I almost never make little prints from small
negs, and generally have a bad reaction to all medium format work partly
because it always ends up being enlarged just a few diameters. For some
reason slightly enlarged prints always send me straight out the door.
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