The gross elements I see that are responsible for making an image "pop" like this great motorcycle shot don't involve gear, though specific gear like lenses and format choice would make the effect much easier to achieve. To deconstruct what I see:
- The entire boundary edge is in sharp focus, the silhouette is tight and has a definite cutoff. Too shallow a DOF and you lose the complete edge.
- The background is almost uniformly defocused and airy (i.e. lower contrast and in a different lighting key, high or low, than the subject)
Break either of those two conditions and the pop disappears.
So onto the original question of getting Autocord quality out of a view camera...
For a given framing the larger the format the shallower your DOF will be, you will have to compensate by using a smaller aperture on the view camera. Unless I completely misinterpret what I've read, always a possibility. Without that compensation you'll lose having the silhouette in sharp focus.
Secondly, with view camera movements you'll want to help the background into uniformity and not accent the depth and out of focus areas, which sounds counter-intuitive. I think that if that works you'll actually get better results than from an Autocord.
I'm going to try this this Christmas week with my crown graphic, not a lot of movements there but I can blow through a few sheets for fun experimentation.
Bookmarks