Can a process camera lens be installed in a view camera?Sure but it is of a different design. The process lens is designed to focus on a 2 dimensional object and project it to a 2 dimensional piece of film (or plate) with sharpness edge to edge. Whereas the photographic lens is designed to focus on a 3 dimensional object and project it to a 2 dimensional sheet of film.
While I learned this in school years ago, I never did see the test results of any experiment with the two lenses head to head.
It may well be that using the process lens would add a degree of artistic license ... sort of like using a 4x5 view lens on a sheet of 8x10 film. I used to get about an 8 inch circle in the middle of the film and that turned out to be one of the favorite things an artist from the late sixties did for many years and I believe some of his work is hanging at MoMA. Process camera lenses can be quite large both in terms of their physicality and their focal length, so granted if you can find a lens board big enough to mount the camera to the lens it should work especially if you are dealing with a view camera which is 8x10 and larger. However, in terms of the lens design, like the last person said, I am not sure about the reproduction quality. |