I came to LF when I was 15 and built a Bender 4x5 kit, and later bought a Linhof monorail. When I was 17 I bought and restored a Deardorff 8x10. Got out of it once maybe 4 or 5 years ago when I was super-depressed, frustrated with everything, in a horrible relationship, and basically my life was broken. I periodically regretted it immensely, but mostly tried to put it out of mind until recently (within the last year), when I bought a Chamonix from a good friend.

Coming back to it has proven to me that I never should have parted ways with view cameras. It isn't my most-used camera. I have 35mm, 645, and digital gear that I use more often, but when there's a shot I want to do on 4x5, nothing else will do. Pretty much nobody outside a handful of my photographer friends understand what I mean when I tell them that it's the simplest, most direct way to make a photograph that I know. There's no noise, no complication, just a straightforward system that, once you've internalized how things work, will pretty much always do what you tell it.

I've come to acknowledge that the deliberate nature of it fits how I like to approach many subjects, and that's enough for me. I have to think about what I'm doing less with a view camera than with any other sort of camera. I like that.