Uh, I definitely didn't forget to post last week or anything. The day job has been busy and paint work on the Miata has been slow going because of the weather (and the day job being busy). Here's something from the archives.
This photo (click for larger image) is the best one I got out of a recent trip with my large-format camera, the first time I've managed to get that out in a couple years now. This scan is kinda crummy because I don't really have a good 4x5 scanning setup right now, but I'm happy with it nonetheless.
Film is Fomapan 100, lens is my Nikon 65mm f/4, I don't recall the exact exposure settings but it was probably somewhere around f/16 and 1/100? I might have stopped it down a bit more but I know I don't ever shoot that lens wider than f/16.
I really do love how that lens can take in the depth of a wide-open scene like this. 65mm is an ultrawide lens on large format, I think it's roughly equivalent to 17mm on a 35mm camera, and while it's definitely not the lens for every situation I think I've taken some of my best photos with it. Just for fun, here's a macro shot of the negative at 1:1 scale, so the equivalent view a 35mm camera with a 65mm lens would have of the same scene:
That's the other magic of 4x5 film. That would be a reasonable photo to take all by itself, in terms of composition and detail, and it's about 7% of the area of the whole 4x5 negative. If you've never seen a 4x5 negative in person, by the way, they're incredible objects -- it's a postcard-sized piece of film, and you can put a magnifying glass up to it and the detail never seems to end. I worked the math out at some point and (while this is nowhere near an exact comparison) this 4x5 negative should have detail equivalent to roughly a 600 megapixel digital photo. Definitely helps to put the price of film and processing in perspective!