Digital BW, The Print

From: "jimbo
> If you don't mind my asking .. what roughly is your process / set up..

Well, over the last year I played about a lot trying different cameras and 
setups, but now I have settled on a D800E with a 60mm MicroNikkor. On the 
front of that I put a nikon reducing ring, three old filter rings and then a 
copying adapter (modified SRB-griturn compact adapter). This gives me the 
minimum focussing distance for the 60mm lens. It will just autofocus, but I 
use manual with liveview. As a light source I am using a daylight 
fluorescent Bowens TriLite.

As someone else said, the problem is depth of focus. With the copying 
adapter at the closest distance for the 60mm lens, I find I have to use f8 
to get reasonable depth-of-focus with minimum diffraction loss. f5.6 is 
better than f8 for diffraction loss, but f16 is best for depth-of -focus. f8 
is the compromise for me. Most of my old Kodachromes are not so important 
that I need to think of focus stacking!

What I have noticed in the 1000 or so I've done so far, is that the old 
Kodachrome 10 from the early 60s is very grainy, compared to the later 
Kodachrome II and then Kodachrome 25 and 64. I haven't got to the later Fuji 
Provia F, where I expect the quality to be much higher.

I'm using camera autoexposure, and then taking the raw files into Lightroom, 
where the autotone gets most of them into the right ballpark reading for 
tweaking.

Bob Frost