View Camera Themes

[AChristensen]

I'm a photography student and I need to come up with a theme in which a view camera would be the best camera to use.

I seem to be having a really hard time coming up with one. Anyone have any suggestions?

[lenser]

Architecture due to the ease of adjusting for straight lines and verticals, plus front rise for tall buildings without keystoning.. Yeah, you can sort of do it with photo shop, but the view camera is wonderful for doing in properly on the film.

[Vick Vickery]

While my first thought, like Lenser's, was architecture photography since that covers most of what I do, another field where the view camera is king is in product photography, both in and out of the studio. Distortion control is as important in product work as it is in architecture.

[msk2193]

Just look how the dSLR people try to market and sell their perspective control and shift lenses. Te advantage of LF then is the huge negative or scanned image file you will have to show details in the product or space being promoted.

[Gem Singer]

Traditional photographic art, using a view camera to create a large negative, and then contact printing that negative on silver emulsion paper, as well

as photographers who use that large negative and print using alternative methods to create their own emulsion on the printing paper.

For example, the work of Michael Smith and Paula Chamlee, JB and Susan Harlin, and many other fine art photographers.

[AChristensen]

Thank you for the suggestions. Since we've been doing quite a bit of work with architecture in this class, he kind of suggested that we try and think of some other themes. This is kind of why I'm having a hard time.

[Eric Woodbury]

Things that don't move and intimadating portraiture.

[Mark Sawyer]

How about a series of collodion photographs? Think Sally Mann's glass plates, Rob Kendrick's tintypes... Not many people doing those with dslr's!

[tbirke]

single most reason I use a large format camera is resolution and price. You can't get the resolution you get from an 8x10 with any digital capture medium with a single shot. This is important especially for scenes with moving objects and fast changing light conditions.

An 8x10 chrome easily gives you around 300 very good megapixels. You could argue about more, but scanned at 300MPix, which is a 6,5x enlargement at 300dpi, I am comfortable to cut out a 60MPix part and compare it directly to an H4D60 output. And it is a lot cheaper for a long time.

[jnantz]

i hate to suggest this
but large format photography doesn't really need a theme.
anything you want, you can shoot with a large format camera ...
sports, portraits, landscapes, architecture, still lives, no-so still lives ...
they were the only type of cameras that existed for a long time ... i don't think
people really need to draw a line in the sand and say " this is done with LF, and nothing else is "