Portrait Lens for Toyo 45CF

I am looking at getting a longer (210-250) for my Toyo 45CF. I currently have a Fujinon 125mm and a Fujinon 150mm (which I may sell) so I am comfortable with Fuji lenses. My research is pointing to a 240 A f9 but I am curious about the 250 W f6.3 as well. The 250 is less expensive and faster but I cant find much information on it. The Toyo manual says that the camera can use up to a 300mm lens but the markings on the rail bed only go to 245. Any thoughts between the 240 and 250 or the lens that can be used on my camera? Thanks

hi lhuhn

i don't have that particular camera, but you might look into 10" commercial ektars or if you like
creamy softness in your portrait lenses other 10" american portriat lenses ( portrait veritar, kodak portrait,
235 converted symmar, maybe a betax shuttered verito ) if for some reason you
are lured to using a converted 370 converted symmar ( thinking, OH its at 370 ! ) the converted focal length
the converted focal length takes a TON of bellows because the "focal node" is further back. the 235 might be OK with yoru
bellows, but i don't know exactly, ,,, if it is OK converted ( its a 150/235 i think ) it was made for portraits and landscapes according to schnieder...
i have a 210/370 and it takes something like 450mm of bellows at infinity, so if you have the wish
and funds for a longer symmar convertible keep the 150/235 in mind. i have a 10" teleraptar( teleoptar ) and it is a
sweet long lens sharp when it needs to be, and a nice rendering when wide open,
... and being a telephoto it gives you bellows to spare ! sometimes they come mounted in
an alphax shutter .. and are available on the big auction site.

good luck finding something longer you like !
john

I used to own a Tachihara with 13" of bellows draw. What is your Toyo, 12" or 13"?. I could use a 300mm but could not close focus it. I put my 250mm Fujinon on it and with bellows fully extended I could focus as close as maybe 6 feet.

Some use telephoto designed lenses on their field cameras for close portraits. I'd recommend buying a Toyo monorail for head or head and shoulder shots. They are very well made and go for next to nothing nowadays. With a monorail you could use that 300mm if you want. I also owned a Sinar P monorail with a reduction board so I could just swap lenses back and forth between my Tachi and Sinar. It was a nice set-up until I got the 8x10 itch.

Alan, the bellows draw is 13" measured from the ground glass to the front standard.

lhuhn said:

Alan, the bellows draw is 13" measured from the ground glass to the front standard.

Click to expand...

It's like my Tachi then. A 90mm up to 210mm work great on these cameras. You can use a 300mm for landscapes but you can't close focus one.

I don't know what kind of portraiture you want to do but if you want to shoot portraits about 5-6 feet away and do head or head and shoulder shots a monorail works well for that. A field camera and monorail make a great pair!

There's a huge selection of new and old lenses out there for portrait work, so you're likely to get a lot of different recommendations here. Here's a good article on LF Forum with sample images that may help you in your search: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/portrait-lenses/

For sharper results, I use a 240mm/5.6 Caltar S-II, which is a re-branded Schneider Symmar-S, and an Ektar 203mm/7.7 which is a really nice lens. Like Alan and John suggested above, a telephoto lens may also give you more focal length without too much bellows extension. For softer results I have a 1920's Cooke Series VIII 12.5"(320mm)/5.6 lens, which only needs 185mm bellows extension at infinity.

So...using Ansel Adams formula 1/u + 1/v = 1/f and working backwards I show that I will be able to focus somewhere inside of 4' using a 250mm lens on my Toyo with 13" of bellows draw. Does this seem correct?

Likely if the brochure says you can use a '300mm lens' on it, that may be advertising blurb for 'with an extension lensboard and/or telephoto lens'. On 4x5", a good head/shoulders shot is what, something like 1:3 to 1:4 macro? You can get away with a 210 or even 180mm at those lengths, a 240mm (like the Fujinon A you mentioned, which is a great macro lens) may not be able to close focus enough? (if indeed it does have 13" of bellows then you might get away with it).

Or play it safe and buy a telephoto lens. My 270mm Tele-Arton just covers 4x5" at infinity and has the same bellows-draw as a 180mm. No movements at infinity but should be enough for portraits. Or a 300/360 tele-xenar might be a better bet.

lhuhn said:

I am looking at getting a longer (210-250) for my Toyo 45CF. I currently have a Fujinon 125mm and a Fujinon 150mm (which I may sell) so I am comfortable with Fuji lenses. My research is pointing to a 240 A f9 but I am curious about the 250 W f6.3 as well. The 250 is less expensive and faster but I cant find much information on it. The Toyo manual says that the camera can use up to a 300mm lens but the markings on the rail bed only go to 245. Any thoughts between the 240 and 250 or the lens that can be used on my camera? Thanks

Click to expand...

Shouldn't you be looking at at least 300-360mm focal length? Nikon offered f/5.6and f/9 options in that range.

Ralph, the Toyo 45CF doesn't have enough bellows draw for that long of a lens. In fact, I am concerned about using a lens longer than 240mm because the bed rail marking max out at 240.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

This may be a mortal sin to some but you can always crop a little if your lens is not quite as long as you would like.

Yousuf Karsh was known for cropping. He shot a 14" Commercial Ektar on an 8x10 camera. A 14" lens is close to a 360mm which would be like a 180mm on a 4x5. Karsh also usually included a bit of the persons surroundings too in his photographs.

lhuhn said:

Ralph, the Toyo 45CF doesn't have enough bellows draw for that long of a lens. In fact, I am concerned about using a lens longer than 240mm because the bed rail marking max out at 240.

Click to expand...

In that case, you're definitely best off with a telephoto lens, ie a 270mm (Tele Arton, Nikkor T), 300mm (Tele Xenar, Fujinon T) or 360mm (Tele Xenar, Nikkor T), or some older lenses like tele-raptars etc. You probably won't be able to focus close enough with a 400mm (Fujinon T) though.

If you can't find a good 240mm, then 210 might not be long enough to make for a 'good' portrait anyway, coincidentally this just showed up the other day:
http://petapixel.com/2016/01/04/selecting-a-portrait-lens-with-correct-focal-length/ (if you're looking at the images, you'll have to increase the focal lengths slightly because he shot on quarter-plate, smaller than 4x5", and try to ignore his completely incorrect use of the word 'telephoto')

Or the other mentioned options of a monorail, or just crop (or even just shoot a 6x7 or 6x9 rollfilm back instead of 4x5" sheets, depends how you're developing/enlarging/scanning as to what sizes you can deal with).

Thanks Dr. I saw this article the other day as well. I am currently bidding on a tele-raptar, so wish me luck


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Interesting thread. I have a Shen Hao wooden 4x5” folder, with a nominal bellows draw of 360mm, but that includes a bit of fiddling with the rear standard, which is fine, but it is fiddly. Real world bellows draw is approximately 325mm.

I have a Tele Arton 250mm lens, which I specifically bought for portraiture and for pulling in whatever needs pulling in, in front of the camera.

I also have a Komura 400 T which for all intents and purposes is identical to a Fujinon 400 T I shot alongside of a couple of years ago. In fact we swapped lenses and took a sheet or two with each other’s lens. The results were interesting, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference, in fact when we met up to compare negatives and prints, there was pretty much nothing in it.

Upon reading this thread I decided to end a beautiful summer day with a bit of fiddling. I pulled the Shen Hao out, then placed the Tele Arton 250 on and then used the same distance from the film plane I generally use for a single portrait, 156cm from the film plane to the front of the subject. At this distance I know I get a full bust shot in portrait mode. That is, if the subject is standing with their arms folded, I just get the bottom of their folded arms with a bit of space above their head.

Moving back about another 10cm I have more fiddle room for when enlarging, meaning I can decide which vertical side I will leave a bit more space on. I have found that I prefer one side with more blank space, as do many of my subjects. Sometimes though, the person whose portrait I have taken, prefers or needs the other side to have more space, so leaving a bit on both sides’, works well with this 250mm objective.

Not having a suitable subject, I used a potted tree outside the garage, picture 001. The rest of the Tele Arton pictures are self-explanatory. I did entertain the thought of a 270mm Tele lens, but firstly I didn’t find a suitable candidate at a reasonable price. When the 250 came up I grabbed it and have been fairly happy with it in using it for portraiture.

I next placed the Komura 400 T on the camera, then racked it out carefully as it is a heavy package on this reasonably light camera. I needed to pull the camera back to 285cm from the film plane, this extra distance can be seen in picture number 001. I left the camera in standard mode to show what could be reasonably attained without going to the extremes of bellows draw. At this extension I know I can get a great bust portrait, and have.

I have used this Komura 400 T on my Toyo 45G monorail, when running a bellows draw of around 450mm, this lens produces some really dreamy stuff and one is certainly looking at primarily producing a head shot with this extension.

I would suggest a minimum of 250mm as a starting point, 270mm would be better, a 300 T would probably be the best all round if you go the telephoto route. The 400 T of pretty much any manufacture is quite heavy on a light camera, not to mention on your tripod. However a 400 T, it is doable.

Mick.

These are the Komura 400 T pictures.

Mick.

When the 45CF is constructed like the 45A2 there should be some mechanism that allows you to slide back the rear standard about 7 or 8 cm. Look for some locking screws at the underside of the camera. Using this would allow you to use the full 14" bellows the camera has.

Of course it is nice to use a telephoto lens on the camera, but with 14" of bellows draw any 210mm or 240mm in a decent shutter will do. At f11 and smaller apertures i bet you won't see much differences between them.

The main advantage of the telephoto construction is that it uses less bellows draw. The disadvantage is that tillts and swings become much harder to control as the optical centre of the lens is in somwhere in front of the lens and not near the aperture as in non-telephoto constructions.

A 210mm is a great lens for portraits, so is a 180mm if you want to go a little shorter.
210s are readily available and cheap, and Fuji makes a great one that works equally well with colour and B&W film.
Telephotos might help with bellows draw, but I find the compression in the image too severe.
You can make a portrait with any FL, there's no good or bad lens for this, only the skill of the photographer makes any difference.
My only portrait lens on 8x10 is a 300mm, which would be a 150mm on 4x5, so the 210 is more than suitable.
These were all shot on a Wista RF with a Fuji-W 210 on Ektar: http://www.aritapiero.com/occupy-ottawa.html

Just because you have all that bellows it doesn't mean that you need to use it or have to. As Ari notes, long lenses aren't really very good for portraits, compressing too much and giving a strange look to the face. They also need a lot of working space.

The old formula for a portrait lens was film length plus width, which gives about 9" for 4x5. In that vein, 210mm is fine, and that's a great length for people. It's also an easy-to-find and cheap length. The next lens to get after that, if you want old-fashioned portrait glow, is a 15" Wollensak Tele-Raptar. It came in a shutter, it's 15" of tele in 9" of bellows draw, and without the back component it turns into a really nice 9" lens of the Verito-type for a quarter of the cost. But I doubt that once you try it and see the results that you will ever use the 15" mode for portraits.

Raptar as old-style portrait lens:

Randy M
by Michael Darnton, on Flickr

I never knew that about the raptars ( removing the element ) I will have to try that !
nice portrait michael!

I think it's probably only the tele version of the Raptar/Optar that does this. The front is, I think, a cemented achromat, like many of the old portrait lenses (the Kodak Portrait, for instance), with a highly negative back component to make it a telephoto construction. I take the front and move it to the back, inside the camera, and stow the back part in a lens wrap. This way I carry two exotic lenses in one, a long real telephoto, and a portrait-length portrait lens. In either mode it covers 5x7, too. They show up on Ebay in shutter for under $200.

It does everything the portrait lenses do. As with lenses of this type, the effect is aperture-related: wide open you get the most effect, stop down even a stop and it starts to go away, and the lens approaches normal behavior and sharpness.

I see that you have the barrel version--be aware that there are set screws, very tiny, at the base of the lens, holding this one in the diaphragm mount. You need to take these out before the components will turn out.

Another example:

Spinner
by Michael Darnton, on Flickr

kewl, do have barrel versions ..
thanks for the details....
one of these days I' try this
not sure when, I seem to have too many
things on my plate ...

Ari is correct that you can take a portrait with any focal length. I've seen some nice ones done with wide angles.

People always ask what is a great portrait lens but they never tell you what kind of portraits they want to use it for. Do they want to do environmental portraits or tight head shots? As far as the amount of compression in the portrait, that is a matter of aesthetic preference. Some prefer more and some prefer less.