Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm f/5.6

Pull a 4x5 field camera out of any landscape shooter's pack and odds are this is the lens already screwed into the front standard. The Nikkor-W 150mm is the default normal lens for 4x5, full stop. The 150 focal length lands almost exactly on the diagonal of a 4x5 sheet, so it sees roughly the way your eye does, no wide stretch and no telephoto compression. Nikon, Schneider, Rodenstock, and Fujinon all made a version in this class. On a finished print you would be hard pressed to call the winner, so the brand fights tend to come down to which name was on the lens you learned with.

Optically it is a symmetric plasmat, six elements in four groups, with a cemented doublet on either side of the stop and a single element outboard of each. Symmetry buys you low distortion and even illumination corner to corner, which matters when you are putting straight architectural lines on a sheet the size of a postcard. Stopped down to f/22 or f/32, where almost everyone actually shoots this lens, it resolves cleanly right out to the edges and holds its corners. The image circle runs around 210mm, so you get real room for front rise and shift on 4x5 without the corners going soft or dark. It will technically reach 5x7 at infinity, but that is the edge of its envelope and you lose your movements there.

Where it shows its limits is wide open. At f/5.6 you are not buying this lens for sharpness, you are buying just enough brightness to focus and compose under the dark cloth. The corners are mushy at full aperture and contrast drops off. That is fine, because nobody makes a final exposure at f/5.6 on a view camera. The f/64 marking tells you the real story: this is a lens that lives between f/22 and f/45, chasing depth of field across a tilted plane of focus.

Flare control on the multicoated versions is good for the vintage, though a proper compendium shade earns its keep against side light. Color rendering is neutral and clean, which is what you want when you are committing to one sheet of E6 or a carefully exposed black and white negative. The drawing is honest rather than expressive. You shoot this when you want the subject reported accurately, not flattered.

The Copal 0 leaf shutter is the other half of the package, and it is where metering gets practical. Speeds run from 1 second up to 1/500 with flash sync at every speed, which is why studio shooters reach for these. The catch on large format is bellows draw. Focus close and you extend the bellows past the focal length, which costs you real light. At 1:1 you are down two full stops. Set the Nikkor-W 150mm in Zone Light Meter with your measured bellows extension and it folds the compensation straight into the recommended exposure, so a still life at half life size does not come back a stop thin. Decades on, a clean copy still goes for a fraction of anything new, and it remains the lens most people learn the 4x5 system on.