[Leica] Lens Design for Documentation of Places--Charles Marville but now with a sensor 1/100th the size.

[krieger at sppd.usc.edu (Krieger, Martin)]

For my work, documenting cities and streets, I need a system that is
good from about 2m to infinity, whose MTF is uniform over the image (and
so we sacrifice maximum MTF in the center, I suspect), that has a
telecentric lens so the sensor need not be too complicated, that need
not have a wide f/stop range , say f/2 to f/5.6 to avoid diffraction,
and whose out of focus MTF shows gentle decline of quality. Does anyone
know of such a lens, for any size negative.

 

Charles Marville photographed Paris's streets in 1858-77 using wet
collodion, time exposure and tripod, and 30x40cm plates. Small f/stop,
lots of depth of field, monstrous negative, and so the detail is
everywhere available. Quite amazing. If we go to at 2.4x3.6 cm sensor,
and we do not use a tripod, what you need is focus stacking, and perhaps
a burst of shots at each distance setting figuring that one will be when
you are not shaking at all. But you also need a lens much as I have
described above.

 

Martin Krieger