[HN Gopher] Large-format camera movements (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ Large-format camera movements (2020) Author : dsego Score : 51 points Date : 2022-12-21 09:04 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.alexbond.com.au) (TXT) w3m dump (www.alexbond.com.au) | jakzurr wrote: | Wow! The how-to photos & layout look great. | | Definitely worth a look, even if, like me, you're not planning on | ever using a large format camera. | Yujiro wrote: | I worked as a photographer for years, from 35mm to 6x6 to 8x10 | inches. Nothing I enjoyed more than the peace and concentration | that working with a view camera gave me. | johnny_canuck wrote: | Agreed - everything slows down and it is absolutely wonderful. | The world through a view camera is a beauty in itself. I never | got a chance to use a 8x10 but I imagine it is even more | incredible. | | I still have my Toyo 45AII tucked away. Last I checked the | prices for film + processing were too much to justify it mind | you. | ruined wrote: | processing film yourself, even large format, is fairly cheap | and easy, and adds another dimension of control and | creativity. i really recommend it. | | you will spend more on film than chemistry. i think it's | worth it, given that modern digital cameras are still mostly | incapable of that kind of work. | enneff wrote: | Seriously!! There's something special about spending an | afternoon taking photographs and only returning with half a | dozen exposures. You really wanted to make every one count. And | looking at that ground glass is like nothing else. | | And then my favourite part was printing the photos by hand in | the dark room. Total blissful, single-minded concentration. I | don't think I have felt more at peace than when I was printing. | AstixAndBelix wrote: | The hardest large-format camera movement: carrying it around. | Tepix wrote: | I switched from APS-C to MFT because it was too bulky. These | days the camera stays at home often. | enneff wrote: | In art school I took a lot of large format photos of industrial | facilities at night, which often involved climbing chain-link | fences with a huge pelican case and tripod. Totally worth it | for the end results, and looking like a quaint old timey | photographer was helpful the few times I was confronted by | security guards. :) | johnmaguire wrote: | This sounds really interesting. I'd love to see your work if | it's available online somewhere. | anta40 wrote: | Louis Mendes will disagree with that: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8KOAj6Caf4 | | :D | madaxe_again wrote: | Some are really portable - I used to travel with a crown | graphic, which folds down small and light. You can do tilt | shift with - it's only in one axis but that's plenty, as the | camera is light enough you can rotate _it_. | | The heavy bit was all the dark slides and film. | Finnucane wrote: | Press cameras like Speed and Crown Graphics were designed be | used handheld. The tradeoff is indeed more restricted | movements compared to a view or field camera. | | But the real killer for portability with a field camera is | that you need a pretty good tripod. I've got a Manfrotto 3033 | for my Wista VX, and I've carried the whole kit around on my | bike. But it's not easy. | | A view camera is generally only going to be used in a studio | --portability is not much of a concern. | musictubes wrote: | Ah, the old Schienflug shuffle... I rarely ever corrected | perspective distortion even though I took a lot of pictures of | buildings. I can only think of a handful of times I changed the | focus plane and some of those were for a tabletop assignment at | school. What I used a lot of was the shift, rise, and fall. Of | course the only reason those were so useful is because the camera | was such a pain in the ass to move around to reframe. Oh, and | make sure you aren't using some fancy telephoto lens with its | focal point out in front if you want to do front movements! They | tend to have pretty small coverage so the amount of movements | would be limited in any case I suppose. | | Now that architecture and tabletop photography are no longer | dominated by large format I'm not sure how much sense it makes to | spend extra money for more movements on your camera. The most | common uses for LF photography these days are landscape and | portraiture. Landscape photos will need, at most, fairly modest | movements and portraits not at all. Most LF photographers these | days would be fine with a graflex or other type of more or less a | box with a lens camera. | | Of course if you really do want to go nuts with movements, | monorail cameras have never been cheaper! | radiowave wrote: | Similarly, the past situations where I've wished I had lens | tilt available (to give the appearance of greater depth of | field), were I taking those shots today I'd probably be looking | at using focus stacking instead. | FpUser wrote: | >"The most common uses for LF photography these days are | landscape and portraiture." | | That large format landscape photo from the article with | "infinite depth" is quite interesting. | staticautomatic wrote: | Isn't pretty much all infinity focus infinite depth? | null_object wrote: | The dismissive comments ("you can just do this with focus- | stacking" etc) are hilarious and totally miss the point. | | Why sit in a boat on a lake fishing when you can buy fish sticks | in any grocery store? | | PS: if you're interested in large-format photography, check out | Nick Carver on YouTube: | | https://www.youtube.com/@nickcarverphoto | lambdasquirrel wrote: | Well to be pedantic about it (going both ways), this method is | far superior to focus stacking when you have a fairly linear | transition in the field of focus. It is also really nice for | shifts. Focus-stacking is a more general, in that you can place | the focus wherever you choose and in any order. But for many | landscape shots, these large-format movements produce an | amazing depth of field that never falls in and out of focus, as | is what you'll get for focus stacking. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-23 23:00 UTC)