Handheld LF, why?

[M.]

Pete, you seem to be under the assumption that hand held LF cameras are inherently shakey. Not so. The six to ten pound mass of a Speed Graphic or Linhof, the gentle, symmetrical motion of Compur shutter blades, and no moving mirror makes it far, far easier to take shake- free negatives than a 35mm SLR. Because of it's great mass, and the ergonomic position of holding it, even a 4x5 Super D Graflex can give needle-sharp negatives. You should try applying Newton's Laws, rather than geometry and math here.

[Dean Lastoria]

Hi: In Camera Ansel Adams talks about the impact of a bigger camera -- both the big neg and inertia. He does the math, and it sounds good to me -- works too -- so read his answer.

Plus, on the slippery why bother slope, why bother enlarging a negitive to 4x6 when you can have a 4x5 contact print without the trouble of using a pesky enlarger... why bother... Dean

[Pete Andrews]

Wow! I didn't expect feelings to run so high on this subject. No offence was meant. I just want to counter a few points, though.Bill, I hadn't taken the inertia factor into account that's true; but I know from personal experience that muscle fatigue plays a big part in adding to camera shake.Hoisting a metal bodied view camera's rangefinder to my face by a single strap and fiddling with the focus for more than a few seconds gives my arms the shakes almost before I can set the shutter and fire it. OK, maybe I need to work out more, but if I wanted arms like Shwarzenegger, I'd have become a navvy. :-)J Norman (sorry, you didn't give your first name). I see the myth lives on, from your anecdote about 'Jet'.The smaller enlargement needed by LF just doesn't reduce the effect of camera shake at all, because the image has a larger magnification in the camera to begin with. For a given print size, any angular movement of the camera results in the same degree of image blur regardless of film format.The case is the same for movement of the camera parallel to the subject too. This has the same effect as if the subject had moved by that distance during the exposure. If the camera moves one millimetre, then the blur is the same as if the subject had jumped one millimetre. No matter what format you use, the end result is the same.I suspect Jet got away with his 1 second exposure because both the bridge and the camera were moving together, nothing to do with the format, and you say he was using a tripod anyway!

I guess we'll all have to agree to differ on the merits of hand-held LF, but I was really a bit curious why people still did such things nowadays. I can't imagine many cigar chewing editors thrusting a Speed Graphic and two double dark-slides at young Jimmy Olssen, saying "f/8, and be there", in this 21st century. Not when lightweight 6x7 rangefinders are available, together with T-max and Delta fims.

[Pete Andrews]

........T-max and delta films. Maybe fims are what fishes use to take their pictues.

[andrea milano]

If I might help my pinch of salt, most of the contributors forgot that there is a modern version of the hand held camera which simply didn't exist before and these are the widecameras or the panoramas, when you are in focus from 1m to infinite at aperture 16, you just need a sunny day to enjoy yourself let alone if you add a flash and go into the crouds and shoot 4x5" or 6x12cm superwide, it must be a lot of fun! Almost point and shoot! Lifting a technika with 240mm and make a portrait without tripod on a cloudy day with no flash might be impossible, but why would you want to create an impossible situation? Work with the things you have and not agaist them. Use the modern version of the Weegee Look, very trendy indeed! Regards

[andrea milano]

Another thought. Most of the things we do in large format can be done very well otherwise, but it is love and this is by definition blind so all the rational things play very little role in the choice of the format you use but rather the way it feels, for you, to handle the equipment.

[james norman]

pete - i guess i am not sure what you are trying to say. i am telling you that i do this occasionally as part of the work i do for HABS/HAER, and i do not have that much trouble hand-holding my crown graphic (135mm lens) at even fairly slow shutter speeds. the work becomes part of the collections of the library of congress - i dont know what higher standard you would want to set for acceptable professional work. what exactly is your point?

[Pete Andrews]

Jnorman wrote: "pete - i guess i am not sure what you are trying to say...... what exactly is your point?"

As I tried to explain previously, I was just curious why anyone would want to hand hold LF out of choice, since there seems to be no good technical reason for doing so.Then someone replied, off list, to the effect that they did it just for the hell of it, and I suppose that's as good an answer as I'm likely to get.

[Erik Ryberg]

Maybe. It seems to me though the answer given above, about needing to use the camera in places where a tripod will not go, has some virtues that "for the hell of it" doesn't. Then there was another answer up there, that the results are better than 35 mm handheld. Both these answers came from people who actually have done the thing they are talking about.

[Pete Andrews]

OK. I accept that if you're stuck out in the field with only an LF camera, then a handheld shot from the right viewpoint might be better than a rock-steady shot from a less than ideal position. But this assumes that no other camera is available to you, and you don't have a 'Benbo' tripod which gets almost anywhere.I did qualify my question with the phrase "out of choice", and in those circumstances the answer "for the hell of it", still seems the only suitable one.

I've never advocated using 35mm as a substitute for LF, only medium format, and if you're implying that I've never tried hand-held 5x4, think again.My own attempts at handheld LF were slow, uncomfortable, and mostly unuseable. That experience gave me a higher admiration for those reporters and photojournalists that were forced to work with 5x4 in the past. I can only think that they must have had an extra arm grafted on, and masochistic tendencies.