Simulating view camera movements in the darkroom

[Jim Jones]

I like my DeJUR 4x5, but agree that keeping it in alignment is a nuisance. I installed a locking thumbscrew to keep the lens board tilt from accidently changing. Aligning the film plane can be done fairly well by aligning the focusing rail with the column.

 

[Donald Miller]

I think I agree with Claire here.

Everything that I do with an enlarger, is to prevent soft edges on enlargments
Glass Carriers, longer than normal lens for film size,Apo Lenses *flat field*
To think one can work an enlarger like a camera kind of makes me think I have been doing something wrong all these years.

If I am not in alingment ie baseboard, negative stage and lens stage, I do get out of focus prints in one section of the image.
When I align the three stages and use a glass carrier , I do get sharp images edge to edge.

I find a very subtle difference in *grain structure *by closing down two stops from wide open. Knowing that my enlarging lenses are not the same as camera lenses , makes me wonder where all this dof is at the base board level.

Am I missing something in my enlarging proceedure????

Bob,

I don't know that I would say that you are missing something...no doubt that perfect alignment is necessary for optimal sharpness.

However I have found that on the Durst that I can have perfect alignment while correcting keystoning or even correcting perspective as I did in one of my images. The distortion that originated at exposure was the reason that I didn't print one image for almost fifteen years.

I swung the lens and carrier stage and tilted the baseboard to arrive at perfect alignment and distortion correction at the same time. So long as everything is parallel, there are any number of points that can be defined as being in perfect alignment.

So long as the axis of the enlarging lens is in parallel orientation to the baseboard, there is no difference in the light level reaching the print.