Yes, this does work well (and it gives you a bunch of options for rapidly extracting a lot of dynamic range out of a transparency.)

But you can maybe even use the lens from your scanner, if you can liberate it and mount it.

Film scanners typically have a thin strip that is often rather wider than a frame of film (because that was the way they achieved higher scan resolution at lower cost).

So what you have in your scanner is a tiny, sharp, fixed aperture lens with an image circle generally large enough for full frame.