So, how often do you really use your camera's movements?

[Richard Wasserman]

+1

I level the camera and use rises and falls always, slight tilt on landscapes commonly everything else extremely rarely.

[Oren Grad]

I use rise/fall often, rarely anything else. But the main reason I bother with LF is to get big negatives for contact printing. I'd use it even if I couldn't have movements at all.

[rdenney]

Rick, you should have used the poll option.

I thought about it, but I'm less interested in the numbers than in the stories.

I already see a fundamental divide!

It's interesting to note that for most of what I was photographing, the distances covering the important subjects were similar to the distance to the nearest subject. The closer the subject, the less the depth of field and the more we might need tilts and swings to manage the focus plane. For my subjects last week, I was working closer than one usually does when doing "landscapes".

Rick "still needing very small apertures for many shots" Denney

[Mark Stahlke]

Shooting mostly landscapes, I use front rise/fall, front and rear tilt and, rarely, front and rear swing. I can't imagine working without front movements.

[Vaughn]

I use them all every time -- though sometimes I use them in the null position.

[munz6869]

I level the camera and use rises and falls always, slight tilt on landscapes commonly everything else extremely rarely.

+ another 1

Marc!

[welly]

I've not been using camera movements a great deal, mainly because I'm still figuring them out. Shift movements I can do all day - not exactly brain surgery, is it? (and I should know).

Tilt movements I'm still trying to grasp. Getting there though! But my worry is when I do get my tilt movements honed, that's all I'll be doing, if you know what I mean.

[C. D. Keth]

Pretty often. Probably more than 50% of the time I use something or other.

[IanG]

Like others I use movements often, far more than 50% of the time, again usually just slight tilt and rise/fall but they are necessary.

While in Turkey I've been shooting hand held with a Crown Graphic and found I was losing shots because of the camera's poor set of movements, switching to a Super Graphic overcame the problems.

Ian

[jcoldslabs]

I got into LF over 25 years ago mostly for the larger negative size. I was enlarging just about everything to 11x14 or 16x20 back then and what mattered to me was greater tonal smoothness and lack of grain in the big prints. It all started when I realized I was shooting my Nikon on a tripod all the time and I thought, "If I'm bothering to haul this tripod around so I can shoot stopped down all the time I might as well put the biggest camera I reasonably can on it."

Fast-forward to 2012 and some of that early rationale still lingers, although I use movements more often than I did then. Ironically, I haven't printed anything big in years. For "straight" shooting I tend to follow Kirk's example--mostly front rise or fall or shift as needed for keeping everything parallel. But as many of my image posts will attest, I have been tilting and swinging to distort the image more than to correct it lately.

Jonathan