HELP with Camera Setting up techniques, Getting the camera straight....!?

[ellwilson]

Hello,

Could anyone please give me some advice or help really??

I have been shooting large format on an off for about a year, though because I have been at university we had to hire out kits so use has been on an off but now I have my own kit.

I shoot indoors small to large spaces, the spaces are very minimal an do not contain much. I am photographing the walls and the corners etc etc...

So when shooting the lines aka the line between floor and walls (horizon line) these are very dominant and important to the success of the photograph.

I use a spirit level to get the camera level etc etc... but i have been having a problem still getting the horizon line straight. I have come to a conclusion that this is because the camera was not perfectly parrell with the alligning wall...

Can anyone give me any tips on getting the camera to be parrell with the wall?? this way i know with the spirit level and this will mean the horizon lines are perfectly straight...

any tips aorund this area would be great or anything on getting the camera straight, planning anything at all would be really good???

Thanks for the help.

[Ulrich Drolshagen]

I suppose, you use a camera with movements. You will have to get every part of the camera level by it's own. You should not rely on the marks for zero positions on the camera and use your bubble level vor this adjustment. And you should make sure, your bubble level works correctly. You can test this by putting it on a flat surface and turning it around. It should in both positions display the same position of the bubble.

Hope this helps a bit

Ulrich

[jb7]

Sometimes, your camera can be straighter than the room-
It took me a while to realize that you can't always accept every built object as being perfectly plumb and level and square...

[poco]

A gridded glass is essential for this kind of thing. I found the "easiest" way of getting a view that's straight on to a building, or wall, is to level the camera on every axis and then do a slow pan across the scene, watching the ground glass to see when the lines go parallel. I usually do this with a wide lens, even if I later have to switch to something else for the real shot. And if you don't have gridded glass, you can simulate it by using temporary rise to match lines with the bottom frame of the ground glass.

No matter how you approach it, though, it can sometimes take a long time to get things really spot on.

[Diane Maher]

First, is your tripod level?

Second, level your camera front to back and side to side using a bubble level.

[julie nightingale]

Hi ellwilson,
I can feel your frustration and know how sometimes you may feel like you are fighting with your view camera and that it is cumbersome and unforgiving.
I'll give you my 2 cents on corrections and hopefully this may help you simplify your strategy.

I forget about the spirit levels unless I am shooting straight down and even then I don't trust them, I use cheap stanley hardware store levels that are small and portable. When shooting a room I start out by correcting the axis of the wall that is most furthest from 0 in the scene with the a front standard swing running slightly less than the degree of the wall, then I tilt the lensbord slightly forward or backward depending on the height of your camera and your vantage point. At this point start moving the rear standard around with your lens stopped down to about 22 to see what is happening to your focus and your planes. THis is kind of rough, but it works. You can spend allot of time reading about camera movements and looking at diagrams, but nothing beats expierimenting with your camera and looking through the ground glass.

I like to loosen all of the dials and nobs on my rear standard an pick it up and let it almost liquify in my hands when I am correcting a scene. That is why I always favor the Sinar f's .. field cameras to the P's as you can move them allot more freely. I don't know how rigid your camera is.


And remember the further away you are from the scene the more forgiving your swings and tilts will be as far as depth of field. By the way try to avoid exposing your film at the minimum or even near minimum aperture on almost any lens. Down there you venture into no mans land and funny things can happen to the quality of your overall image.

Hope this helps you a little!! Have fun!!

[cjbroadbent]

JB7 has got it right. The room is usually off kilter. So is the camera. I only trust the Ebony nonfolding SW at my end.
Three alternative ways to square up, depending on the size of the set.
1. Use string, 2 nails and chalk to trace a line perpendicular to the target wall. Put the tripod anywhere along the perpendicular and point it down the line.
2. Hang a mirror flat against the wall in the middle of the shot. Illuminate the camera. Focus on the camera through the mirror. Shift the camera around until you can see (centered on the ground glass) your lens, centered in the mirror.
3. Place 2 mini led lights on the floor at each end of the wall. Balance them up with the ground-glass grid-lines (but get square first).

[ic-racer]

You can place an enlarger-alignment laser on the wall to which you want to be parallel. Take the lens off your view camera and bounce the laser off your ground-glass. When the beam bounces straight back to the laser, your back standard will be parallel to the wall, both top-to-bottom and side-to-side.

[Alan Davenport]

Level the tripod, level the camera, make sure the back is vertical (all with a spirit level.)

Then, don't trust anything except the groundglass. As someone noted, a gridded screen comes in handy at this point. The large format groundglass is the first and truest WYSIWYG interface.

[Nathan Potter]

Well I never paid much attention to this leveling and straightening stuff because it's all somewhat arbitrary. When it is important such as in architectural work use a gridded screen as poco suggests above. I use a screen with grids at every half cm. so I don't have to move the tripod head to line up a grid exactly with a horizontal or vertical line in the scene - a necessity for not taking the time to level everything. Remember you can do some minor correction on the easel in printing or correction in PS if you go that route.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.