The famous Group f/64, to which Ansel Adams and several other prominent photographers of that day belonged, were named that because of the f-stop:
The term f/64 refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture sometimes implies a long exposure and therefore a selection of relatively slow moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life, but in the typically bright California light this is less a factor in the subject matter chosen than the sheer size and clumsiness of the cameras, compared to the smaller cameras increasingly used in action and reportage photography in the 1930s.
I presume that was for either a 4×5" or an 8×10" large-format camera. I will presume the latter in my question.
When you capture images on a medium- or smaller format, the magnifications needed to make an 8x10" print increase from the 1:1 contact print of an 8x10" capture. Therefore, just saying something is f/5.6 doesn't tell you the depth of field achieved in the final print.
From Wikipedia, we see this:
or going the other way, you have this:
My question is:
If the Group/64 used f/64 for a certain look in their prints with their equipment, what would be the equivalent f-stop in the other format sizes?
- LF 11×14" — ???
- LF 8×10" — f/64
- LF 4×5" — ???
- Better Light LF Digital — ???
- MF: 120 film / 6×4.5 cm — ???
- MF: 120 film / 6×9cm — ???
- SF: 135 film / 24×36mm / 35mm / full-frame — ???
- SF: APS-C / 16×24mm — ???
- Average compact camera — ???
- Average cellphone camera — ???
Actually, if I just knew the formula based on the diagonal, I could fill out the rest myself. If an 8×10" transparency’s diagonal of 12.8" yields a certain effect stopped down to f/64, I figure we should be able to use a formula of some sort to derive all the others based on their diagonal. I just don’t know what that formula is, and would like to know, please.
I feel like I’ve seen a list like the one I’d like filled out above from Roger Clark, but now I can’t find it.