Use of rise and fall for landscape photography

[bill zorn]

roger, keep in mind that all lenses are sharpest on axis-in other words, the image at the edge of the image circle will not be as sharp as that at the center. it's always best to use camera position first.

bill zorn

[Ellis Vener]

I didn't say that reading books and using Q&A forums is a bad idea. I meant to say that reading only takes you so far. To get what dancers and actors call "muscle memory" you have to put the texts to work in the real world: you have to shoot film. Since Polaroid gives you near instant feedback at a reasonable cost (have you priced digital options for large format recently?) you can see how different movements either by themselves or in combination effect the image. If you can do, then review the results, in my experience you learn much faster and comprehend more deeply.

Here are the basic tenets of camera movements:

1.) Front (lens) standard movements only affect focus distribution.

2.) Rear (film plane) movements affect both focus distribution and perspective rendering.

3.) When you get a plane of the subject, the plane of the lens standard, and the film plane to intersect in a line, every point in the plane of the subject, no matter how far away or close to the camera that point is, will be in focus at any f-stop (Schiempflug's theorem, AKA "the hinge rule").

4.) If you ever get lost in what you are doing with movements. Zero all movements on the camera, point the camera directly back at the subject and start all over again.

Everything else about view camera theory is built around these four axioms. It is that simple.

[Charlie Stracl]

Lot's of discussion here, so I'll throw in 2 cents.

1. It probably doesn't do much good to say what specific movements were used without saying why. "tilt" only says what; "tilt for plane of focus" or "tilt to create looming effect" tells a lot more.

2. The actual amount of tilt/shift doesn't really matter much unless you're going to go find the tripod impressions at a site & duplicate the photo.

3. Communication seems such an imprecise art. I guess that's why it's interactive.