Sharp Landscapes on the Fuji GW690II (90mm)

At one time, I rigged up my own optical bench, blah, blah, and received annual copies of the Edmund Scientific Division catalog, which is always interesting. I also had connections with a major optical coating company in this area, as well as a major custom lens maker, when I had questions way over my own level. For a number of years I also worked alongside a former NASA optical engineer, and absorbed a bit of his own knowledge. I don't know exactly what you own connection to optical design is; but I would assume that kind of career can be interesting.

But after awhile the dust settles, and one just gets attached to certain lenses. For example, the first Fuji lens I ever bought was a 250/6.7 which was unquestionably better corrected than my previous 210 Symmar S. And my current 250 Fuji A is even better corrected. Nonetheless, I used that old 210 S exclusively for over 10 years, mostly with old-school Ektachrome 64, and still love the gentler rendering which that particular combination gave. I have six print on the walls around me right now from that 210 lens, two black and white, and four Cibachromes up to 30X40 inches.

But I also have to face the music of inevitable aging, and wisely started acquiring lighter weight gear too. Of all of that, I'm currently having the highest success rate, per keeper shots, with the Fuji 6X9 RF's.

DREW WILEY said:

I don't know exactly what you own connection to optical design is; but I would assume that kind of career can be interesting.

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I put a fair bit in my Bio a few days ago. Not sure if that is visible ?

Thank you. But I'm not sure where that is - do you have an official website? Or is it linked over on the LF Forum and not here?

It's part of the user's profile, but I must say I tried looking at someone else's and didn't have much success.

I've been a lens designer since 1987 and did these two on a brief spell in Germany :

Wow. That's fascinating. One of my favorite toys is the 300/4 EDIF tele for the Pentax 6x7, another draft horse sized lens, superbly corrected. But I don't have any official specs about it. The whole trick with these big teles is a really really stable tripod attachment.
I wonder how many of those Zeiss ones sold, and at what kind of price?

Someone gave me the numbers recently, I think it was only around 110 . They went on sale at around DM 30,000 in 1998, for the pair, with its hard-case, which was around £10,000 at that time.
I saw one on EBay last year offered at £52,000 !

Well, if any one actually went for EBait that expensive, it would have either been a collector, or more likely some well-funded cinematographer adapting it to a movie camera. But you never know. The wide-field astro photographers who bought up most of the Pentax 300 and 400 EDIF's at one time would spend $40,000 or more dollars on just the necessary "tripod" (clock drive n'all). Some spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mini private observatories with remote controlled domes. That's how lots of comets and asteroids were first found.

I've already mentioned elsewhere that I'm only a five minute drive away from where the big boys (NASA, NSA, EU Space) order up their own optical toys, including space telescope and giant ground-based observatory components. I've lost all my personal connections there since the former owner passed away. But up until the pandemic, once a week they opened up a side room with older grinding machinery and free coaching so amateur astronomers could make their own mirrors - up to 18 inch diameter! If I got a second life financially and longevity-wise beyond basic photography, I'd probably go into microscopy again, the opposite direction.

I got into optics by grinding my own telescope mirrors.
They are not too hard to do at home, up to about 12"
You need to learn a few things along the way, of course.

Yeah, that whole company I mentioned, Tinsley (now a division of Coherent) began by manufacturing amateur telescopes in the 1920's, and all along continued to locally foster hands-on amateur astronomers. Then WWII arrived and the Govt awarded them rifle scope contracts, then NASA came along and launched them into a whole other league, into becoming the leading maker of aspheric optics and segmental astronomical mirrors in the world. But I never got further than pulling out binoculars atop some high Sierra Pass, where the air is so clear one can distinctly see the polar cap or Mars just with those.

Up atop the crest of the White Mountains, across Owen's Valley from the high Sierra, and also over 14,000 feet tall, there is a road leading to the Bristlecone Pine Preserve (oldest trees on earth). And until that road starts getting rough, you sometimes see big vans or trailers on turnouts, with huge DIY telescopes, often with barrels made of concrete pouring tubes (Sonotubes), with up to 16 inch mirrors. Up there the the desert air is particularly clear, and relatively free from any light pollution.

The last time I was there, this past Sept, the wind was so horrendous that I couldn't even set up a camera tripod, but did get some lovely handheld shots with my Texas Leica. But that was calculated. I was deliberately chasing the edge of a storm for sake of wonderful clouds.

I know Tinsley - we were working up a bid for E-ELT with Tinsley and a couple of other groups before our Head Office got cold feet. They perfected stressed mirror polishing.
The big telescopes in the White Mountains, I know what you're talking about - years ago there were articles about John Dobson from San Francisco building big cheap telescope and going up there.

That's interesting. I dealt with the then owner several times a week - not on a technical basis, of course, but in terms of facilities supplies and special products which we especially had access to due to our industrial/military sales division. And they were nearby. He was a real friendly fellow and liked to get out of the office and run his own errands. But then they moved from Berkeley a little bit to the north, and have since merged with a big laser tech company, which makes a lot of sense given the marriage between lasers and telescope refinements these days (like artificial stars). I had a very very minor part in the Hubble redo, supplying some sealant for the retrofit correction lenses.

But it is a bit baffling, all the interest in DIY telescopes in this particular area, since there is so much coastal fog that most nights you can hardly see the moon. Driving inland where it is dryer once helped, but now all the burbs out there below the hills, and right up onto the hills, is a major source of light pollution.

A friend of mine, recently forced to retire due to health issues, was an Astrophysics Professor at UCB, and had the keys to the big Lick Observatory telescope atop Mt. Hamilton to the south - the biggest refractor in the world at one time, I think. But the light pollution was getting so bad around there, they could only use it for a couple hours a night, starting around 2:00 AM. The teaching telescopes nearer here are smaller - a couple of 16 inch reflectors under domes, but used mainly for teaching children and high school students, not the University types. I can see the advantage of that giant old Lick refractor instead, in that respect, because it is almost like an astro history course in its own right, with a huge collection of once significant glass plates, displaying the evolution of serious research telescopes at their midpoint.

I was invited many times to go there - but a 4 hour round trip drive for a brief session, staying up all night, trying to beat the freeway rush hour back - I'm too lazy for that. I have many times been to the wonderful terrain on the unoccupied opposite side of Mt Hamilton, generally with 8x10 gear. During day hours, the Lick telescope facility is open to visitors, and essentially a museum.
The little Emoscope in my backpack can't compete with it, but does what I need, and doubles as a spare ground-glass magnifier.

Mark J said:

More annoying to me is the lack of a 'B' setting and the need to use 'T' ; where the shutter doesn't close until you start winding the advance lever.

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I suspect it might well be a mechanical interrupter/ interlock acting on 'B' to make it behave like 'T' mode - i.e. actuated by shutter release, then released from it's locking position by the advance lever. Probably able to be relatively easily altered. I suspect that the shutters probably actually have a genuine 'T' mode as well, given that they're likely standard #0 shutters - Fuji didn't waste much on luxuries/ custom parts on those cameras, they were made to perform very utilitarian roles (formal group photos of tourists at official tourist photo locations) reliably - hence the 1/2 roll 120 capacity and the tachometer.

Mark J said:

I can believe the Perez/Thalmann numbers above - but bear in mind the contrast at say 10 or 20cy at full aperture is lower.
It is very consistent across the aperture range. There nothing much between 16x20" prints from this and ones that I've taken on my Horseman VH with a 120 Symmar-S or the 75 Super Angulon.

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This is why I've been sceptical of the Perez tests - I'd much rather see meaningful MTF tests rather than a set of resolution tests that often say more about the test conditions (or inconsistency of the tester) than the real-world optical performance of the lenses. I do wonder if in a double blind test people would really be able to tell apart 16x20s from a Makina 67, a Mamiya 7, a GW690 (or 670 etc) etc.

Lachlan Young said:

I do wonder if in a double blind test people would really be able to tell apart 16x20s from a Makina 67, a Mamiya 7, a GW690 (or 670 etc) etc.

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I am sure the same will be true for comparisons of similar size prints from 35mm cameras from any of the prime 50mm lenses made by top manufacturers (Nikon, Takumar, Leitz (blasphemy!!), Minolta, etc.). So many other variables and issues affected optical prints. The lens and the body rigidity are just 2 of the degrees of freedom.

Ditto. But when I'm using the full linear 6X9 proportion with respect to printing onto 16X20 paper, the larger neg size inherently renders more detail and less apparent grain than a 6x7 equivalent neg. To do a valid comparison, you have to either crop to the same proportion, or use the 6X7 version of the Fuji RF instead. But then there is no exact correspondence between the standard focal lengths either. Almost a moot point as far as I'm concerned, however. I just like that longer 2:3 rectangle.

I can visually detect the difference in an 11X14 print between what was MF versus 4X5 versus 8X10 in my own work. Yet none of that might be actually measurable. There's just a different feel and intensity to things. Then you've got contact prints too.

Kodachromeguy said:

I am sure the same will be true for comparisons of similar size prints from 35mm cameras from any of the prime 50mm lenses made by top manufacturers (Nikon, Takumar, Leitz (blasphemy!!), Minolta, etc.).

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You'd probably see more differences there - but more from other perceptual characteristics of image quality (e.g. the harshness of some manual focus SLR-era Nikons is immediately obvious - yet other Nikon primes would leave people swearing that they had to be Leitz) - the sample group I chose was precisely because the Perez results purport to greater differences than are likely meaningfully imageable in real-world usage.

DREW WILEY said:

Ditto. But when I'm using the full linear 6X9 proportion with respect to printing onto 16X20 paper, the larger neg size inherently renders more detail and less apparent grain than a 6x7 equivalent neg. To do a valid comparison, you have to either crop to the same proportion, or use the 6X7 version of the Fuji RF instead. But then there is no exact correspondence between the standard focal lengths either. Almost a moot point as far as I'm concerned, however. I just like that longer 2:3 rectangle.

I can visually detect the difference in an 11X14 print between what was MF versus 4X5 versus 8X10 in my own work. Yet none of that might be actually measurable. There's just a different feel and intensity to things. Then you've got contact prints too.

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1. Yes I think the 6x9 format has an excellent quality/weight value, that's why I've used it for years. The Fuji GW670 and 680 models are not quite as interesting to me as the 6x9 one because the lens is the same and the angle of view decreases.

2. I think the advantages of printing a fixed print size from bigger and bigger negs are measurable. If you consider that a level of fine detail on a print is around 5cy/mm, then it's fairly easy to see by reference to the lens MTF curves, that lower printing magnifications mean you're looking at a lower frequency (and hence a higher MTF contrast), from the taking lens. For a 16x20" print, a 2X enlargement of an 8x10" means 5cy/mm on the print comes from 10cy/mm on the neg, where the lens contrast can be 80% ( at f/22 ). From 6x4.5cm, 5cy/mm on the print comes from 45 cy/mm , where a good MF lens at f/11 might only give you 40 to 45% MTF.
Even if you stop-down the bigger format lenses more, you still have the MTF of the film, which is better as the spatial frequency goes down. The distance across which the light scatters laterally between the grains and by TIR off the film surfaces, is more of a fixed value that doesn't scale up or down with film format. This is particularly important in highlight areas, so you tend to get less 'bleed' of light in highlights, and hence more highlight tonal fidelity, when printing from a bigger neg.

For contact prints, 5cy/mm print = 5cy/mm from the film, and you also lose the callier effect from the enlargement process.

I was just using 16X20 as a general comparison because it's the most common black and white print size I make. It's a whole different story with color film, where I make mostly 20X24's, plus 24X30's and 30X40 inch ones. In the bigger two cases, it's largely a contest between 4X5 and 8X10 film instead. But I will print 20X24's from Ektar color negs from both 6X7 and 6X9 cameras. That would have been unthinkable to me back in Ektachrome 64 and Fujichrome 50 days.

Oddly, the softest print on my walls is a 20X24 Cibachrome made from the early 4X5 Polaroid 545 version of Fuji 50 sleeves, which never really laid really in that system. It's still a beautiful image, but more uneven in focus that a conventional holder one would have been.

Lachlan Young said:

(e.g. the harshness of some manual focus SLR-era Nikons is immediately obvious - yet other Nikon primes would leave people swearing that they had to be Leitz)

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I can confirm this.

My Nikon Ai-S 35mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.4 act like my corresponding 35mm Summicron ASPH and 90mm Elmar-M lenses. My Nikon 50mm f/1.4 isn't remotely the lens even my ancient collapsible LTM 50mm Summicron is (and I'd imagine a modern Summi 50mm is that much better).

While I much enjoy the other Nikon primes in my stable - 20mm f/2.8, 24mm f/2.8, 105mm f/2.5, 135mm f/3.5 - none of them are in the same league as the aforementioned. That doesn't mean I don't use them (the 20mm and 105mm being favorites), but they simply do not match the higher end of lens performance.

An honourable mention belongs to the Nikon 180mm f/2.8. Mine is a Nikkor-P which is ancient but it's still razor sharp and contrasty. I'm told the modern incarnations are even better still.

I shoot almost nothing but monochrome film so I cannot comment on the relative merits of these lenses on colour film or digital. I will say that the better Nikons show up well the few times I've used them on a D750 but that was hardly rigourous use.

DREW WILEY said:

Ditto. But when I'm using the full linear 6X9 proportion with respect to printing onto 16X20 paper, the larger neg size inherently renders more detail and less apparent grain than a 6x7 equivalent neg. To do a valid comparison, you have to either crop to the same proportion, or use the 6X7 version of the Fuji RF instead. But then there is no exact correspondence between the standard focal lengths either. Almost a moot point as far as I'm concerned, however. I just like that longer 2:3 rectangle.

I can visually detect the difference in an 11X14 print between what was MF versus 4X5 versus 8X10 in my own work. Yet none of that might be actually measurable. There's just a different feel and intensity to things. Then you've got contact prints too.

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I've shot a ton of 6x9 both in roll film and sheets, as well as a ton of 4x5 and I concur with your view.

There is something qualitatively different between the two formats. That's not to say that 6x9 is materially inferior, it just seems to have a different "look" than 4x5. I can't quite find a way to describe this well, but 4x5 seems to me to be more three dimensional and exhibits more "depth" to the image.

That said, the inherently greater portability of 6x9 makes it more likely I will go after images in more challenging-to-get-to locales. Here's one I would have been unlikely to drag a 4x5 to. It was a grey, murky day after a storm and I found this with my GW690II:

https://www.tundraware.com/Photography/Gallery/Silver/media/large/20230325-1-08-Swamped.jpg

I haven't quite decided what to shoot this afternoon. I should be putting on the 8x10 pack and starting to work out my knees more on the hills, but everything on the hillsides is still miserably muddy and soggy after heavy rains the past two weeks. I might have to default to the beach and my Fuji 6X9 again. I always get good shots that way, but I really do need to start getting more serious workouts.

The woods adjacent to the beach do have a lot of those tangled forest opportunities like in your lovely picture, Chuck. I did print one of those a couple weeks ago from a 6X9 neg onto 16X20 MGWT. The sun is breaking out a little more today.

Very good.
The Fuji comes into its own when you're operating in a swamp , and can't afford to put a camera bag down.
You can shoot hand-held or with a monopod with 400 iso film.

I generally use TMax 100 in it, sometimes handheld, but more often with my lighter weight Ries wooden tripod, which can certainly handle mucky situations much better than a CF tripod can. I carry the tripod rifle-style over my shoulder. And I do use a minimal comfortable shoulder bag which does not need to be set down. But for really nasty weather, I might shoot TMY400 instead.

Yet another strategy is a large backpack with either 4x5 or 8x10 kit, or a P67 with big tele in there, plus the little Texas Leica shoulder bag as well. Then either the larger Ries wooden tripod strapped to the back of the back, or a large CF tucked under to top flap.

Today I'm out hunting small game instead - suitable content for poetic little images printed on 8x10 paper. So I'm taking along both the GW690ii and a Nikon - a small bag over each shoulder.