My wife and I are in the planning stages for producing a Web site for a historic district in our neighborhood. I plan to shoot photos of the area, but am thinking that using my 4x5 would be overkill, since the images are for the Web only.
I have access to an Olympus DSLR for the project.
Should I use my 4x5, or just use the DSLR? I'm thinking that for photos of homes, I would use the view camera for perspective correction.
I don't think it's overkill to have the advantages of a view camera for architectural photographs. If you might have other uses for the images, like print sales to property owners or to the city or a historical museum, large format originals would give you some more possibilities.
I agree with David. I'd use the view camera for control, so the buildings are presented in their best form.
As David says, If anyone wants to order color prints, then by all means use the better equipment.
Photoshop allows you to perform perspective control: given an image with sufficient pixels, you can stretch the image all over the place, and web viewers won't be able to tell the difference.
If the images will be in color, on the web only (and thus rather small), it would be far easier to shoot things digitally. The only limitation might be dynamic range, but if you bracket, you can merge layers and correct for that too. Again, Photoshop enables that with minimal effort.
There's no question but that 4x5 is overkill for the web. So I'd be inclined to use your digital camera and correct any distortions (e.g. keystoning) in Photoshop or a similar program if you have that capability. That's especially true if you're bearing the costs of the project (e.g. film and lab). The only reason I can see to use a LF camera for a web project like this would be if you don't have an editing program such as Photoshop that would allow you to correct distortions (assuming, as you say, that the photographs are solely for the web).
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
I would also use the view camera, but try to shoot digital too, so that you have both formats available, should you need them. But I recognize that it requires quite a lot more work.
Scanning your 4x5 images on a flatbed scanner should be good enough for web use.
You can correct perspective distortion in one plane easily using PhotoShop, just like using rear tilt/swing or tilting the enlarging easel. It gets more complicated (or just doesn't look quite right), if the image has any barrel or pincushion distortion, which will depend on your DLSR lenses, or if the building isn't just a simple straight facade, and there are multiple planes at varying distances to the camera. The non-view-camera solution to multiple planes is to shoot wide and crop, if you've got enough pixels.
It is shortsited to only use the minimum equipment needed. Architectural photography always benefits from large-format which has available many more controls for getting the image straight and in focus. (simply put). There are few, if any, perspective control options available for any DSLR, as swing/tilt functions for depth-of-field control.
Perspective control in architectural photography for web publishing can be done with a good digital camera, wide angle lens, and cropping. However, such publishing may create a demand for prints of LF quality. Don't count on reshooting those images with the 4x5. Buildings evolve and even disappear.
Apart from the technical advantages of view cameras, view camera photos just look different. There is a formality, visual correctness and thoughtfulness to view camera photos I think because of the size of the camera and the toil and expense of operating it along with of course the necessary use of a tripod. I think that's why view cameras are so perfectly matched to architecture. They are alike in many ways.
Anyway, when you project is done let us know. I would love to see your town. Cheers and good luck.
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