A nod to all here. I'm not a newbie to large format photography but have been on a hiatus for 15 years. I started 4x5 photography while serving at the Pentagon while in the Navy in the 70's. I had returned from Vietnam and years serving on Destroyer Escort ships and I was assigned as the unit photographer. I set up a darkroom and gathered cameras from the Navy Photographic Center at Anacostia Annex, Washington,D.C
I was issued a Super Speed Graphic camera and all the goodies. I had no formal training in photography but had been taking photos with cameras since the 50's. I must have done well as many of my portraits of officers were mounted on " Rouges Gallery" in the Pentagons Rotunda.
It was at this time I met a fellow sailor who was a Navy Photographer, he and I started a company called "Photo-7".
We both finished up our Navy careers and did well in the commercial photography in the civilian world. He is still at it in NYC.
Contracts expired and I moved onto Radiation engineering and High Speed Photography. I kept up with large format photography and built a couple of darkrooms in Maryland and here now in New Mexico. Experimenting with anything I could get my hands on I tried all sorts of films and chems. Many made by me just to play with. I do not consider myself an expert, rather an enthusiast of LF photography.
The digital age hit and I went down that road always looking back at my LF cameras.
I'm retired now and have the time to really delve into the large format cameras again. A good friend of my just retired as well and he has a few 8x10 cameras and he too wants to get back into it. We will team up and try our hand of shooting the interesting things here in NM.
Thanks for the site and letting an old phart like me join. Maybe I'll learn a thing or two.