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This lens is truly massive and I’m gonna have to make a custom Toyo lensboard just for it. F5.6 on 8x10 is massively bright for focusing, especially if it’s not a meme portrait soft focus fast lens. In 4x5 terms it has the look of a 180mm f/2.8.
The 35mm equivalent is about a 50mm f/0.7 so wide open it’s obviously pretty unusable. By for focusing it’s quite amazing — by f/11 I already need a dark cloth 100% of the time, but at 5.6 you can go without one half the time.
All I need now is to make that lensboard, get the new front standard, and the extension rail so I can use the 620mm f/12 convertible back (if you screw off the front it converts from a 14” focal length to a 24” one) for portraits. And film holders which I’m not looking forward to — for some reason they are 10x or more the cost of 4x5 ones.
And of course, find some film. Might start with XRay film to start, like that 4x5 monorail anon did for his portraits a while back (which moved me enough to go to large format)
