Rittreck View 5x7: 80 Year Old Plaubel 210mm Lens Large Format Whole Plate Shanghai GP3 100 B+W Film

Made with a Rittreck View 5x7 camera with 6½x8½ inch whole plate back, Plaubel Anticomar 210mm f4.2 lens and Shanghai GP 3 film.

The Plaubel Anticomar 210mm f4.2 lens was manufactured in Frankfurt some time in the 1930s or 1940s. It came into my possession when it accompanied a Linhof Technica I acquired in the mid-1980s. I was not into "antique" lenses then (this lens was already 40 years old when I got it) so I put it in a drawer and forgot about it. I re-discovered the lens November 2021 after thinking it had been thrown away decades before. This is one of the first images I have made with the lens after almost 40 years of neglect under my ownership.

Some 4x5 images I made a Balmoral Beach turned out sharp-but-slighty-creamy. I wanted to know whether the lens covered larger formats like 5x7, 6½x8½ or 8x10. Modern lens designs tend to mechanically restrict the image circle to slightly larger than the circle of acceptable sharpness, the rationale being that any light from outside that circle will only bounce round inside the lens and camera and reduce overall contrast. Older lens designs often don't do this, so they can create a "circle of illumination" that is significantly larger than the acceptably sharp image circle which means they can cover a far larger area with image, even if it's not acceptably sharp (this area is often where swirly bokeh and similar novel and currently fashionable defects appear).

Neutral density filters were used to achieve a long exposure because the Compound 3 shutter now only works on B, hence the motion blur.