Nikon Nikkor-W 135mm f/5.6

Stop this lens down to f/22 and the image plane goes flat and even across the whole sheet in a way the older Tessar-type 135s never managed. That is the plasmat design talking. The Nikkor-W is a six-element, four-group plasmat, symmetrical enough to control distortion and field curvature across a 4x5 sheet, and it shows the moment you pull the dark slide. Corner to corner the negative holds, with none of the soft outer-field smear you get from a convertible or a triple-convertible old-timer.

Wide open at f/5.6 it is sharp enough to focus and compose, but nobody shoots large format wide open for the look of it. You stop down to f/22 or f/32 for depth of field, trading a little diffraction softening for front-to-back sharpness, and that is where this lens does its real work. Contrast is high in the modern multicoated way, which means it eats flare from off-axis sun better than any single-coated lens of the 1960s. Point it into a backlit window and you keep your shadow separation instead of losing the frame to flat gray haze.

The catch is coverage. At 135mm the image circle is roughly 200mm at f/22, which covers 4x5 with movements to spare but will not stretch to 5x7 or 8x10. This is a 4x5 lens and not much else. People who try to run it as a wide on a larger format run out of circle and vignette the corners hard. If you want generous movements on 4x5 for architecture, you stay inside that 200mm circle and you watch where its edges fall.

Think of it as a normal-to-slightly-wide for 4x5, a working field and studio standard. It sits in a Copal 0 leaf shutter, which syncs flash at every speed up to 1/500, so anyone working with strobes gets full sync across the range without thinking about it. The rivals people cross-shop are the Schneider Symmar-S 135mm and the Rodenstock Sironar-N. All three are multicoated plasmats from the same era, and honestly you would struggle to tell their negatives apart on a light table. The Nikkor often turns up a little cheaper used, which is reason enough for plenty of buyers.

One metering note. For close work you extend the bellows well past the infinity-focus position, and any draw beyond one focal length costs you light. Frame a head-and-shoulders portrait on 4x5 and you can easily be a stop down before you have metered anything. Punch the focal length and your actual bellows draw into Zone Light Meter and it returns the bellows-extension factor, so the exposure you set already accounts for the light the bellows ate. The 52mm filter thread is small for large format, which keeps screw-in ND grads cheap and easy to find if you would rather hold the sky down in the negative than burn it in the darkroom.