When I was in high school I saw the Calumet ad in Popular Photography for a $99 view camera (those of you who remember now know my approximate age!), and I sent for their brochure. I didn't understand everthying they discussed about perspective control, but I knew that was the kind of camera I wanted to use.
I guess some of us are just drawn towards detail and image control and view cameras just come naturally to us.
WRT to the other thread about Half Dome... I realize completey that no photogra ph I can ever make could possibly equal the grandeur and majestic natural beauty of Half Dome - or the delicate beauty of a tiny single wild geranium blossom.
Still, it is my love of natural beauty that drives my photography. Photographin g nature with large format is doubly rewarding. I get to be immersed in nature and experience it first hand while I am trying to photograph it to share with ot hers. And although my photographs are small two-dimensional representations of what moves me in nature, I still want them to be as beautiful as possible. Anyt hing less and I cheat myself, I cheat my viewers (even if they can't tell they d on't consciously notice the difference) and I short change the natural beauty th at is my subject. For my needs, I have found shooting with large format is the only way I can achieve the results I desire.
Besides, I just like to do things differently. I've never been a trend follower . I've been shooting with large format for so long now, it has become an interg ral part of who I am. Technical issues aside, anything else just doesn't feel l ike a camera to me. Obviously, in the hands of others, the smaller formats are capable of stunning work. I admire their skill and wish them well. But, for me , I'll still take my big, cluncky, slow, expensive large format cameras and the wonderful big transparencies they (occasionally) allow me to produce.
I am addicted to the image. My love affair with images goes back to the 10th grade. The high school I attended had photography classes, so like any red-blooded American teen, I thought that it was a good way to earn credits without having to take a "real" class. We learned how to use the Graphics and B&J press cameras, and basic darkroom work. I was totally hooked from the first day. Years later, with the time pressures of jobs and family the big cameras got left behind in favor of the 35mm systems- this was when the first AE cameras were hitting the market. A couple of years ago, I now a bachelor/empty nester - I found an old B&J camera - & then a Tachihara. I can't imagine how I managed the last 30 years without them! I am now starting to make images again!
I'm with Charlie. I had shot a bit of 35mm and 2 1/4 square, but was never really happy with the results. I finally got together enough money to order one of those $99 Calumets and really got hooked on LF. Incidentally, $99 was a lot of money then...more than a week's wages. After that first Calumet, there has seldom been a time when I didn't have a 4x5. I have owned the usual lineup of 35mm cameras over the years, including several Leicas and Nikons, plus numerous twin lens Rolleis and such. I used them a lot, but always missed the big negative in the darkroom. Even with the smaller stuff, I always shot with an LF frame of mind...trying to get the best image possible. About 10 years ago I began to LF as my primary camera, with occasional 35mm or 120 shots. I have not regretted my decision. I like taking the time to compose and shoot with the larger stuff.
My love affair started in the 70's in London, when I met my first mistress. She was mature and experienced and she was big and beautiful.
Her name was Sinar and she could do anything, twist and tilt and swing and shift. She was "yaw free", which impressed a young lad straight from the wilds of New Zealand, and she was part Swiss and part German and this exotic mix made my head spin. To walk into the studio in the morning and see her draped in her black focusing cloth, waitiing for me, was enough to start my pulse rate climbing. Her big, bright focusing screen, her long black bellows, shiny chrome rail and delightful knobs contributed to her seductive nature and I was hooked. She would let me shift her this way and that, tilt her up and down, swing her right and left and all the time without a word of complaint.
When I started doing modelling photography, she never got jealous, and was always there ready to do her job, looking on sliently at the gorgeous young models, with her critical German eye, waiting for her turn to help to give them that special image.
We worked together for many years forging a strong bond of mutual respect. We used to delight in watching, when those beautiful, big transparencies she produced, left the "prima dona" art directors "gobsmacked", for once in their lives. It was a sight to behold!
But as the years passed, I realised that I had to move on, I wanted to travel, explore the world, and watching my contemporaries mixing it with the younger and slimmer and lighter models, I knew Sinar could not come and I got distracted by the new girls in town and the day came when we had to say goodbye. I remember closing that studio door for the last time and I swear that the glint went out of her eye just before the door clicked shut.
I left my LF mistress in London and for the next few years, I travelled with my new loves, the beautiful German Rollei and her smaller sister Contax and for a time I was satisfied with their beauty and freshness. We were able to go to locations that Sinar would never have gone. We had a lot of fun and saw many things, but I was never completely satisfied with the German sisters and longed for the "movements" of my Swiss beauty - my first love.
So now, no longer having to met deadlines and put up with demanding clients, having seen the exotic and the mundane, having climbed the mountains and looked into the valleys and realising that my German girls just can't cut it, I have once again been seduced into the adult world of LF.
This time my seducer is called Ebony. She is an exotic Japanese, although sometimes there's that German glint in her eye, she is both functional and beautiful and although she can't twist and shift and tilt quite as much as my first love, she is lighter and easier to manage. She delights in taking long walks in the woods or along the beaches early in the morning or late at night, she is beautiful to look at and lovely to touch, so I suppose after 30 years I've been seduced again and I've come full circle.
Perhaps I should never have deserted my first love ;-)
I'd been shooting a 6x7cm Mamiya RB 67 for almost a decade, but in 1999 the Canon rep loaned me a 24mm t/s lens. I took it to American Basin in the San Juans of Colorado in late-July, and the wildflowers were unreal. I composed, focused, then tilted the lens and (as Emeril would say) BAM! I was hooked. I researched the t/s adapter for the Mamiya RZ67, and all the equipment would've cost me more than just making the jump to 4x5. The rest is history. Jeez, I love those BIG Velvia trannies!!!
First film camera I ever picked up was a 4X5, Linhof SuperTech V that I took an extra job for 6 months to buy. I had taken some digital shots with what was available back then (4-5 years ago). Travel shots of Bolivia. That was the first time I had ever really used a camera, and I loved image-making, but was unsatisfied with the quality of mid 90s digital (if you'll remember, somewhat like bad APS processed by monkeys). Took some beginner photo book out of the library, which said beginners should buy a 35 mm camera, medium format was for people with $ to burn, and large format was horribly complicated, fussy, too big to carry, and only appropriate for people with degrees in photography. But gave great quality. So, of course I decided LF was for me. I bought an 8X10 camera 2 years later, and 12X20 this year. I love shooting 8X10 the most, because I find the whole process of using the camera and working with negs of that size intuitive, satisfying and fun, I can carry my 8X10 pretty easily wherever I go when I travel, and because I really enjoy what I produce with it. Producing something that a lot of my friends and colleagues enjoy and will hang on their walls has been incrdibly satisfying, and I'm lookig forward to my first gallery show in April. No idea if I could be getting "equal quality" or "better" with a Hassy, or the latest digital, a 4X5, a Holga, or whatever, and I've never really bothered to ask myself. I enjoy everything about using 8X10, and am very satisfied with the results. Why bother comparing it to something else?
Lately, I've just begun making Platinum prints in 8X10, soon 12X20, and THAT has really rocked my world. They are just unbelievable to look at, and actually a lot easier than printing silver contacts with all that dodging and burning. I think I may be hooked. A new "justification" for shooting 8X10 and up, I guess!
I remember as a child standing in a museum in Los Angeles and looking at photographs that were different than any I'd ever seen. These were BIG. 30X40 inces. And the detail was all there to be studied. That sank deep into my psyche. I thought those were for somebody else, not me. I was sure pictures at that level were out of my reach.
Years later when we had our first child, I convinced my wife that if we paid the $ for a good camera I could do anything those expensive portrait guys were doing. So we bought a Nikon FG. And paid portrait photogs also. The Nikon lay mostly unused. A promise unrealized. It didn't even seem to make good snapshots. 10 years later I had assembled a large collection of old Lionel trains. I had a 6 1/2 X 18 foot layout with all the antique tin buildings and it was really very pretty. I'd go out in the evenings with a glass of wine and turn out the lights and watch my little city come to life with all the buildings lit up. I wanted to take some good pictures but it was apparent that just getting the Nikon out wouldn't cut it. I bought some books and some lenses and began to learn what that little Nikon really could do. I gradually got more interested in the Nikon than the trains.
The rest as so many have said is history. For me the biggest hurdle was convincing myself that I could come up with a correct exposure independent of a 35mm camera. I grew up in the world of auto exposure. That was magic that was built into those little cameras by the japanese. I remember to this day the first time it dawned on me that if I could figure out an exposure......hell I could take a picture with anything! You older guys that started there in the first place will think that's quite odd. But it took time to convince myself that the little Nikon wasn't magic after all. Auto exposure was/ is a crutch, and I had to learn how to walk without it.
Once I crossed that threshold, the leap to 4X5 was nearly instant. A Cambo 4X5 and a Caltar SII 210 were a combination that while heavy, were extremely efficient.
Large format is a bottomless pit. There's no end to the combinations, the learning curve, the possibilities, the expression.
When I first picked up my tech 5x7 I thought: "#$%@!, this is heavy! I'm going to have to shoot less," And I did. And I still had more good shots. Let's face it folks: A beer just tastes so much better when you worked hard.
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