Who is using LF commercially?

[Nicholas Whitman]

Randy-

There several reasons for teaching LF even though you students won't be making a living from it.

LF is a skill set honed by experience combined with a photographer's working kit. One doesn't just pick up a LF camera and fore-fill an assignment with the knowledge gained in school a few years earlier.

However for an insightful appreciation of historic photography and of LF done to date some time under the focusing cloth is essential.

LF breaks down the components of photography, lens focal length, aperture, focus, film plane, exposure time, etc. into their most basic forms in a way that is easy to see. It is a great demonstrator tool for the educator.

And as you state discipline, a cornerstone of LF, is really very helpful for the digital photographer too.

Nicholas Whitman
www.nwphoto.com

[GPS]

Randy-

...
And as you state discipline, a cornerstone of LF, is really very helpful for the digital photographer too.

Nicholas Whitman
www.nwphoto.com

Well, chess playing is also good for discipline... Today's curriculum in a college is done, unfortunately or not, in a more straightforward manner. The reasoning with witch Randy tries to save the LF education there is probably not enough to persuade the local decision makers, I'm afraid.

[Kimberly Anderson]

Recently there has been talk of removing this class from the required list of classes. It had been suggested that virtually no one uses large format cameras commercially any more.

Randy,

I am teaching at Waterford in Sandy, Utah, which is a K-12 prep. school. I have 9 4x5's that I incorporate fully into my JR AP photo curriculum starting in December. We start them easy with paper negatives move into film and a simplified/modified Zone System. We contact print initially and end up utilizing full camera movements and printing in pt/pd. We have two 8x10's and an 8x10 enlarger that the students also use.

While the commercial use of large format has dropped off tremendously, I find that as a teaching tool for both the spoken (and unspoken) curriculum, LF is perfect. The lessons learned from shooting LF transcend the medium and are applicable to a wide variety of real-life lessons.

Right now they are between Cyanotypes and VDB's, and two of my students have already taken out the 8x10. When they are ready they can go out with me and shoot the 4x10, the 8x20 and the 11x14 cameras.

The students are quite receptive to the lessons learned from the large and ultra-large cameras. They rise to the occasion and are very excited to put up with the struggles when they see the results are mind-blowing.

Will they use these cameras ever in their life again? Personally it does not matter to me. The lessons they learned while in my program are enough to justify it year after year. Yes, I do have pressure from above to eliminate any large format from my curriculum. I will leave the program if they forced me to eliminate LF and film from my teaching.

Good luck with your decision!

[Kirk Gittings]

FWIW........This year where I teach part-time, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is offering for the first time in ages an 8x10 film class. SAIC does not teach any commercial classes perse (except maybe my architectural photography class), only art classes. Having sold their 8x10's a few years ago, they made arrangement with a sister school in New York to borrow theirs. Also people in the photo dept tell me that the film cameras are checked out now 2-1 over digital despite the fact that they have quantities of the latest and greatest DSLRs and MFDCs

[chris_4622]

Kirk,

A few years ago we went to the SAIC artist sale and saw this: http://www.hyounsangyoo.com/1.html
Talking to him he told us he used an 8x10 and for this one image he used around 100 hundred exposures.

Nice to see they are bringing the 8x10's back.

chris

[Thom Bennett]

I can imagine the pressure to discontinue view camera/large format classes. To the outsider it seems antiquated and useless. But learning to use a view camera goes much further than just a bigger negative/image. It goes to composition, lens selection, field of view, angle of view, where to position the camera in relation to the subject, and, generally, how to see the world photographically. Do painting students jump right into painting without taking drawing classes first? Do journalism students start writing for the paper before they know how to construct a sentence? It's a sad fact that this world we live in is more interested in speed of delivery than with the quality of what is being delivered.

Last year we were looking for a part-time photographer and 80% of the applicants had never even heard of a view camera let alone know how to work with one. It was very disconcerting to me.

[ozphoto]

Interesting information regarding schools and LF.

The college I graduated from has also gone totally digital - no more wet processing at all!! They have some LF kits that are presently being debated to be taken in a major move or not.

I am hoping I can get my hands on one of the kits - but also would like to see the remainders go on to the new premises.

I learned an awful lot using LF - it taught me how to slow down and take time, not to mention have some *fun* with lighting my studio product images.

Will have to see what transpires. . . . .

[Photojeep]

Thank you again to all who are participating in this discussion.

I do need to stress that no decision has yet been made. In fact, it has pretty much dropped off the radar. When the discussion was initiated, the professor making the proposal went out of his way to make it very clear to me that he was not talking about dropping the class from the curriculum but rather removing it from the list of classes required for graduation.

Thank you again for counsel and words of encouragement. I will keep you all posted.

Randy

[emo supremo]

Having recently completed a go in the undergraduate photography class (as a member of the class) it was fun to let my classmates play with my gear/processes because it was clear they were NEVER going to see these objects of nascent art-making again. I often wonder if the people who make such decisions/cuts would advocate for keeping film in the currciulm if they could be led into the darkroom and watch the experssion on the faces as images appears in the Dektol.
Also, may I go off on a tangent and share with you a phrase lifted from Claude Harrison's The Portrait Painters Handbook page 8: "Yet I have sometimes heard painters, with ample private means, attempt to justify likenesses that pander to some mythical public taste, with the excuse thet they need the extra money. I find this attitude as greedy as it is misguided."
Cuts like a knife.
I work at a University too and they are, after all, businessess. Some (not all) who run them are often quick to focus on bottom line to the point where the heart and soul of a program can be macerated out of existence. Progress?
Regrettably, thanks to them we can continue in our teaching positions in this poor economic climate. A tough debate to be sure.

[D. Bryant]

[QUOTE=Thom Bennett;585798]I can imagine the pressure to discontinue view camera/large format classes. To the outsider it seems antiquated and useless.

But learning to use a view camera goes much further than just a bigger negative/image. It goes to composition, lens selection, field of view, angle of view, where to position the camera in relation to the subject, and, generally, how to see the world photographically.

All of that can be done with a DSLR, with a lot less expense. Think of the digital camera as electronic Polaroid.

Learning to develop film and print negatives really has nothing to do with photography any longer.

It's time for a wake up call about LF photography in photography curriculums, it's time has past.