If you're going to photograph in public, it helps to have a sense of humor. 99.9% of the people are nice and curious.
If you're going to photograph in public, it helps to have a sense of humor. 99.9% of the people are nice and curious.
As I've posted before on this forum, the only person who gives me grief for shooting film is a know-nothing clerk at my local camera store. He always manages to get in some kind of condescending remark about how film is on the way out and that I should get with the times. I brought in a roll of color film to be developed the other day, and he said, with much drama and exageration in his voice: "Wow -- I haven't seen one of those in a long time!"
I love steam engines
I work with the 4X5 mostly in Central Park in NYC. My favorite part of the day is when people want to talk to me about the ins and outs of working with large format. People ask really smart questions and are often very engaging. Some are just curious and ask how old the camera is but others ask technical questions about camera movement, lenses and film. Others ask conceptual questions that are quite challenging.
A woman I met a month ago wanted to know how, conceptually, using a large format camera would make portraits different from ones made with small format cameras. I've met musicians who talk to me about how the color and contrast of their sound is affected by the technical aspects of their instruments the way that different lenses and films affect those same things in photography. I've spoken to a man who was from a town somewhere in Central America and there was a photographer in his town who had a large format camera and it reminded him of his childhood and he just wanted to tell me that.
This kind of stuff happens every single time. These people are as much a part of the landscape as the trees and rocks and meeting them and talking to them is as much a part of the rich experience of photography as making the picture is.
Look at this: poor kids say WOW! to LF: "it's inverted!"
Toyo 45 CF | Sinar P | Sinar F2
I fail to see how using a large format camera is somehow antithetical to using digital camaras and vice versa. Sure, I will use my 4x5 to capture the detail of a landscape, like I have for over 30 years, but for spontaneous people shots, or sheer visual experimentation, the DSLR is amazing. For instance, I just shot our family christmas party last weekend. 154 shots on one memory card. Natural room light, no flash using 1000-1600 iso with a great old 50mm f 1.8 lens. The result: wonderful color balance despite many types of room light, low "grain" probabaly less that if I had used 400 iso film, many warm spontaneous shots that I can put on a CD and mail to family who were there or who couldn't make it.
So, why does using a view camera mean you have to hate digital cameras? I think of myself as a visual artist who uses whatever medium that best does the job. Not all photography is still life and landscapes. Duh. I relish my DSLR for what it does for me. Its expanded my creative vision.
Narrow, ridgid thinking is what gets my goat.
Hello:
I find my 6x9 AS fc attracts curiosity and interested but never rude comment. This can be inconvenient given a need for concentration and vagaries of light. It also gives occasion for pointing to the value of the local landscape. I must contrive to use it in Central Park as well, but here in the Upper Saint John River Valley the final, gentle, suggestion is always that I should get a digital camera.
Best to you all for the holidays
Frank
Love the doggie in the background checking out your camera, Eduardo!
Eduardo's lens board does not look fastened on the bottom. Nice lens though.
I spent two weeks in September photographing with my 12x20 deep inside Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah where only people with serious 4WD vehicles can go and not have to be towed out. It was an experience of a lifetime. I felt like a modern William Henry Jackson except I used a Ford Explorer instead of a horse drawn wagon to get me and my 175lbs. of camera gear, film, etc. and another 200lbs of camping gear there. The day I hiked down into the Maze from our campsite on the rim with nothing more than a canteen of water and 3.3 Mpixel digital camera, I realized that there is a real place for digital cameras and digitally enlarged negatives for making plantinum/palladium prints. Just try to get any large format camera into these remote locations and you will need several teenagers or twenty-somethings to be your mules, but I doubt you will ever get a 12x20 into the Maze. You WILL need ropes and don't try to climb out in the mid-day sun. It is not an easy climb. I speak from experience and it was only 85 degrees in the shade that day. I photographed the Land of Standing Rocks, the Chocolate Drops and Maze, and the Needles from a distance with the 12x20 from the rim of the Maze. To photograph from down inside the Maze would be virtually impossible without a major expedition and funding.
Today there is still no comparison between a contact print from film and a print from a digitally enlarged negative. I know because I have done both and teach both, but in a few years, the digital technology will have evolved to erase such distinctions. Eventually, film will be obsolete except for the cachat of still shooting film. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy shooting film, but soon it will not be necessary to achieve equivalent print quality for contact printing processes such as Pt/Pd printing.
I still shoot 12x20 and film, but you can't deny that digital can do things and get to places that will never see an ultra large format camera. Open your mind to the possibilities and options. "To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn. And a time for every purpose under heaven". I've taught platinum/palladium printing from film and digital negatives for many years. Both have their place.
Bob Herbst
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