Digging Out an Old Method

I wanted to photograph some of my mechanical pencil collection. I thought about using multiple focus steps, but decided to try using the Scheimpflug principle, with my Nikkor 45mm TS with a 2x teleconverter. This lens has a tilt mechanism, and it is possible to play with the plane of focus. When the subject plane, the lens plane, and the sensor plane meet at a single point, the whole subject will be in focus.

My improvised studio was a table on my balcony, with some grey card.

The results of todays experiment.

3 Multi Colour pencils by the German Fend, and Swiss Caran d?Ache

Three pretty pencils by Sheaffer, Parker and an unknown brand.

The Rolls Royce of Pencils, Yard O Led, Three vintage, and one I bought new.

A Czechoslovakian Barclay silver hallmarked pencil from about 1950

That's a very cool technique. I've never seen it before. Thanks for these..

[quote="@NCV"]
mechanical pencil collection

What a great assembly of precious writing instruments. Excellent results.

The thumbnails look so blurry becuase they are presented with an extremely low resolution (only 500 pixels) and the jpg is then heavily compressed.
These thumbnails have about only 20kB ! That is really tiny and leads to the poor visible quality we see on DPRevived :-)
But the good news is that Arvo is working on increasing the size and quality of the thumbnails :-)

Hi Nigel
good effect to get everything sharp :-)

It is the technique product photographers used a lot, when things like that were shot on large format.

This works very well. Is it difficult to get the correct tilt angle? Wonderful writing instruments captured perfectly.
Thanks
barondla

It is not too difficult to do. I used a ruler laid across the subject area, and by trail and error got the angle right by checking the focus along the ruler. Once you have done that you are fine for all the different shots from the same angle.

Getting shadow free diffuse light is more of a problem.