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Liz - soft focus study

© Bob Fowler

Liz - soft focus study

Uploaded: February 16, 2006

Description

I used my Eastman #2 5X7 camera, J&C Classic 200 film, and a very old 10" f/5 Bausch & Lomb Petzval lens (in front of a sync'd Packard shutter) for this portrait of Liz. Because this lens has no iris or waterhouse stops and always wide open at f/5, it was necessary to use a 2 stop neutral density filter for this exposure. The ultra soft focus effect is from a combination of the slightly long focal length, a rather fast f/5 aperture, and the wonderful field curvature of a Petzval portrait lens. I've since made iris disks (kind of like waterhouse stops, but you have to first remove the front lens cell to insert them) for f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22. Stopping down to f/16 gets rid of most of the field curvature and kills off the majority of the soft effect, so I tend to shoot pretty open with this lens. I processed the film in Microdol-X 1:3 to keep the grain and contrast under control. Lighting was 2 White Lightning 10000 monolights in large umbrellas.

Exif: FNumber: , ExposureBiasValue: , ExposureTime: , Flash: , ISO: , WhiteBalance:

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