The invention of tilt and landscape photography

[QT Luong]

Reviewing 19th century landscape photography, I notice that the compositions in general do not have any foreground, often thanks to an elevated viewpoint. This made it possible to essentially get an entirely sharp photograph by focussing at infinity. My understanding is that the cameras of that time did not have tilt, that would make it possible to focus on foreground and background simultaneously.

Do you know when was tilt invented ? Extensively used ?

The critics of nature landscape often say that nothing really new was done in the 20th century in that genre. But to me, the wide-angle far-near composition (popularized by the likes of David Muench), do represent an innovative esthetic. Why is it deemed insignificant ?

[Bill_1856]

In addition to the lack of tilt, do you suppose it had somethng to do with the paucity of wide-angle lenses?
I believe that most wide images were made with moving-lens Panoramic or Circuit cameras. Did the same esthetic apply to work done with this equipment?

[Kirk Gittings]

Can't answer your question, but IMO the advent of panchromatic films and filters in the 20th century allowed for a whole new aesthetic in b&w landscape photography based on tonal enhancement. Amongst other things, dramatic skies became a major aesthetic tool rather than blank negative space and b&w landscape photography entered a whole new period that held sway through New Topographics in the early 70's.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Yes, I was going to say exactly what Kirk said.

My 1890s American Optical 11x14" camera has front tilt, and it's definitely made to be a field camera. Maybe someone else has an earlier example.

[RJ-]

I'm finding that one of the challenges of interpreting 19th century landscape photography, is engaging in a dialogue which eschews the anachronistic projection of post-modern values.

One way to undertake this challenge is to return to core fundamentals of camera design with respect to the use of tilt.

The British Victorian tailboard camera variations did not possess movement other than a racking back and forth to enable approximation of focus along a parallel plane to the imaging axis. On the other hand, with the evolution of the British field camera, Sanderson, in particular, is credited with the first patent in the formulation of a front swinging standard which was subsequently copied and used in a myriad of plate cameras, both whole plate; half plate, quarter plate and double whole plate formats, as well as some in between. His patent was dated from 1895, placing it at the tail end of the 19th century, and designs spun off this once his patent expired. However rear standard tilt designs in plate cameras were also not uncommon, by default of the construction method of anchoring the rear standard to the camera base by metal brackets. Rear standard tilt probably preceded the invention of the front standard tilt, if anything, its significance might have been under-exploited until Sanderson's design arrived.

With respect to the critics' perspective, it is difficult to unmask the subtleties in the historical technique of engaging in landscape photography using the available technology at the time. Perhaps these subtleties are too subtle for the critic to pay attention to, and broad sweeping statements about landscape photography from an anachronistic perspective hold more sway.


Kind regards,

RJ


Whole Plate Column (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/wholeplate)

[QT Luong]

Can't answer your question, but IMO the advent of panchromatic films and filters in the 20th century allowed for a whole new aesthetic in b&w landscape photography based on tonal enhancement. Amongst other things, dramatic skies became a major aesthetic tool rather than blank negative space and b&w landscape photography entered a whole new period that held sway through New Topographics in the early 70's.

I certainly agree with that statement (and it puzzles me that some here seem to consider that A Adams didn't innovate compared to Watkins), but I was trying to address a different aspect of composition in landscape photography. When did good wide-angle lenses become available, and who used them effectively first ?

[Steve M Hostetter]

commercial deardorf tilts

[Bryan Lemasters]

[QUOTE=QT Luong;422247]Reviewing 19th century landscape photography, I notice that the compositions in general do not have any foreground, often thanks to an elevated viewpoint. This made it possible to essentially get an entirely sharp photograph by focussing at infinity. My understanding is that the cameras of that time did not have tilt, that would make it possible to focus on foreground and background simultaneously.

Do you know when was tilt invented ? Extensively used ?QUOTE]

I think that Hillers and Muybridge both did some work with fairly strong forground elements - at least in comparison to Jackson, Sullivan and Watkins. Didn't some of those older cameras have rear tilts and swings?

[Bill_1856]

\When did good wide-angle lenses become available, and who used them effectively first ?

There were some wide-angle lenses before it (like the strange one filled with water), but I would guess that the DAGOR was the first really good one to be generally available. Just before the turn of the Century.

[Kirk Fry]

Are Zeiss Protar V lenses any good? When did they start making them. Sure they are slow but the landscape does not move that fast. K

[Ole Tjugen]

The Dagor is a wide-field lens, not a wide-angle lens. They are also much later designs, especially the WA Dagor.

There was the Harrison Globe (1860), improved by Busch in 1865 as the Pantoskop. Both were difficult to make, especially the latter, and as a consequence were horrendously expensive. Yet the number of these lenses still in existence shows that they must have been popular!

The first useable, affordable, and widely available wide-angle lens was the WA Aplanat of Steinheil from 1866. Sorry, but the WA Rectilinears are a different design and do not really perform anywhere near as well. I have both types, and have tried both...

By 1890 the art of glass making had advanced enough to allow construction of the Zeiss Protar f:18 (Series V), the first of the WA Anastigmats and the first major improvement over the Aplanats. That these lenses were still in production as late as the 1930's should prove how successful this design was.

For more extreme coverage, the Goerz Hypergon (1900) was (and still is) it.

[GPS]

...
Do you know when was tilt invented ? Extensively used ?

...

The tilt in question was not invented, it was simply empirically discovered with the first loupe produced. It started to be used in cameras only with the coming of lenses that were able to have sufficient covering power AND acceptable sharpness in the covered area. Pre-Petzval lenses were not good for tilts.

[Struan Gray]

Scheimpflug is always described as an artillery officer, but he developed his famous rule while trying to improve photogrammetry-based mapping from balloons and, later, aircraft. Photogrammetric cameras with adjustable tilt (nullable really, they don't have much movement available) seem to appear about the same time as field cameras with front tilt, that is about the mid-to-late 1880s or 1890s. My Optemus 12x15 field camera can be dated by the trade name to the 1890s and has crude axial tilt built into the front standard.

The intuitive value of adjusting the precise plane of focus seems to have been realised long before Scheimpflug's rule was formulated. As I said, early photogrammetric cameras were usually rigid boxes, and when front rise was introduced in the 1850s or so, it was emphasised that the lens must remain parallel to the film when moved - so the negative consequences of tilting the lens axis for later analysis were well known at an early stage.

Also, portrait cameras with a few degrees of back tilt around a hinge half way up the standard seem to have been available much earlier. Perhaps the wet-plate crowd here can comment on how that would have been used in practice, since the available range of movement doesn't seem very useful.


PS: the pantoskop is the wide angle lens that turns up most often in the photogrammetric histories I have found online.

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

The wikipedia Scheimpflug page (and H. Merklinger's well-know pages) refer to a French patent by Jules Carpentier in 1901, only a few years before Scheimpflug's patent in 1904.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle
In addition to what have been reported here I'll have a look at my Prochnow Voigtländer report volumes 3 and see if any sign of tilt can be seen in the 1880s-1890s on old Voigtländer catalogues...

[OFF-TOPIC]
BTW and going scandalously off-topic, the last issue of the Hasselblad advertising magazine "Victor by Hasseblad" (2008, special photokina edition) features on page 13 a superb landscape view, probably in Iceland, a lava field covered with moss, taken with the new tilt+shift accessory introduced at the 2008 Kina for the H-system.
Interesting to see that photographers that can afford an H-series Hasselbald digital camera have asked for this accessory ; my understanding was that they spent more time in front of their computer in image post-processing and probably had no interest in any Scheimplug device... so direct mechanical & optical Scheimpflug is alive and well in the digital age !
[/OFF-TOPIC]

[Steve M Hostetter]

[QUOTE=QT Luong;422247]Reviewing 19th century landscape photography, I notice that the compositions in general do not have any foreground, often thanks to an elevated viewpoint. This made it possible to essentially get an entirely sharp photograph by focussing at infinity. My understanding is that the cameras of that time did not have tilt, that would make it possible to focus on foreground and background simultaneously.

Do you know when was tilt invented ? Extensively used ?QUOTE]

I think that Hillers and Muybridge both did some work with fairly strong forground elements - at least in comparison to Jackson, Sullivan and Watkins. Didn't some of those older cameras have rear tilts and swings?


If tilt was around then I think Mathew Brady would have used it in the mid 1800's

[Mark Sampson]

Perhaps, like a lot of other things, the possibilities of front tilt only became apparent well after the feature was introduced. It could be that the 19th century workers had an esthetic that didn't require front tilt, and much later, Adams/Muench et al. decided to use it as a creative tool. Remember, the electric guitar was invented as a way for the guitarist to be heard over the horn section of a big swing band. But once that capability was there, eventually people began making quite different music, although it took a while.

[Frank Petronio]

Who knows, maybe it was a broken camera? Once they figured out rise the front standard was already mobile, all it took was a bent wire or missing screw to tip the standard forward.

I wonder what Roger Fenton did in the Crimean War, ca. 1855?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/morris/match2-large.jpg

[neil poulsen]

According to . . .

Rudolph Kingslake in his book, A History of the Photographic Lens:

> The first well-known wide angle lens was the wide-angle Globe lens developed in 1861.

> The Hypergon, an extreme wide-angle lens by anyone's definition was patented by Goerz in 1900.

> I couldn't find any references to the wide-angle Dagor by Kingslake. Like the wa-Dagor, the Angulon of 1930 is based on a reversed Dagor design. A Goerz 1913 catalog does not mention the wa-dagor, whereas a Goerz 1940 catalog does list and describe the "super wide-angle dagor" lens.

[Jeff Conrad]

Both Sanderson's 1895 patent and Carpentier's 1901 patent can be found on the European Patent Office search at http://ep.espacenet.com/. Enter GB189500613 for Sanderson's patent and GB190101139 for Carpentier's.

It's obvious from Sanderson's description that he understood the effects of tilt, and he seems to imply that the concept was already well known, consistent with what several others have said here.

[Leonard Metcalf]

Perhaps this is to do with an emerging aesthetic rather than the specific discovery.

Just a thought on this discussion,

Regards, Len

[Bill_1856]

Most photographic aesthetic was derived from the established techniques of painting. I think the near/far perspective may have been unique to photography (at the time).

[cjbroadbent]

Stereo views, which were widely used in the mid-1800's, required something in the foreground to have stereo effect. Some of the best American landscapes were done as survey work by an ex-stereo photographer (whose name escapes me). He always did his landscapes with an in-focus secondary subject in the foreground and a path or river leading off to hills (he knew his stuff). If his camera folded, he had tilt.

[Toyon]

In addition to the lack of tilt, do you suppose it had somethng to do with the paucity of wide-angle lenses?
I believe that most wide images were made with moving-lens Panoramic or Circuit cameras. Did the same esthetic apply to work done with this equipment?

There were plenty of wide angle lenses. Wide angle rectilinear lenses came along in the 1860's or 70's followed by WA anastigmats in the 90's.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Stereo views, which were widely used in the mid-1800's, required something in the foreground to have stereo effect. Some of the best American landscapes were done as survey work by an ex-stereo photographer (whose name escapes me). He always did his landscapes with an in-focus secondary subject in the foreground and a path or river leading off to hills (he knew his stuff). If his camera folded, he had tilt.

I've seen stereo cards by Carleton Watkins, and some of his 2-D compositions that I can think of fit this description--

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2000/watkins/capehorn_full.htm

But in this image, I think he could do it by stopping down for the foreground and letting the background go a little soft, as it does anyway in the haze.

[Sevo]

Most photographic aesthetic was derived from the established techniques of painting. I think the near/far perspective may have been unique to photography (at the time).

Deep perspectives were the pride of painters ever since the Renaissance. And they must have been quite feasible with earliest photographic equipment, given the small apertures available back then. If they weren't popular it more likely was because it was something which painting already could do in hyperreal quality for centuries (and where photography could not compete until the current boom of digital composites), while painters could not match the level of far distance detail in photographs. A picture of a mountain with every tree and rock visible at maximum detail was new - "shepherdess with god Pan and trees in front of mountain" was not.

Sevo

[Struan Gray]

I agree that wide angle perspectives, including the effects of rise and shift, were widely explored in the West from the Renaissance onwards. See here for a couple of great examples culled from the excellent Bibliodyssey blog:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/85009674@N00/2963246947/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/85009674@N00/2961942836/

It is also true that framing a wide view with foreground interest such as various form of pastoral activity was a commonplace of painting and illustration - the western grand landscape school was in some ways reacting to this by leaving the foreground bare.

But I don't know of examples of the signature 'looming' foreground that Muench and others use from before the C20th. The C17th loved to play with perspective and projection - there are a whole class of paintings that need to be viewed in a cylindrical mirror for example - but in my casual surveys of art I haven't come across anything that matches the bulbous foregrounds of the US nature school.

It does however turn up in graphic novels and illustration much earlier in the C20th, albeit as a reference to a photojournalistic look in smaller formats, so I see the wide-wide-wide look in LF as a follow-on to the wide angle craze in 35 mm.

[cjbroadbent]

I've seen stereo cards by Carleton Watkins, and some of his 2-D compositions that I can think of fit this description--
.....
David,
It was Timothy O’Sullivan I had in mind.

[Ole Tjugen]

... By 1890 the art of glass making had advanced enough to allow construction of the Zeiss Protar f:18 (Series V), the first of the WA Anastigmats and the first major improvement over the Aplanats. That these lenses were still in production as late as the 1930's should prove how successful this design was. ...
I came to realise that it isn't completely obvious whether "these lenses" in the last sentence above refers to the Protar f:18 or the WA Aplanats. But then I checked a little more, and found that it's valid for both!

[cowanw]

H. L. Hime was a Canadian photographer who was with the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition in 1858. This is a photo of a skull in the near ground and the prairie in behind.
http://phomul.canalblog.com/images/Hime_the_prairie.JPG
Not on the web but published are quite wide angled views of Fort Garry with a long s shaped road and fence leading up to it and a View of Red River from St Andrew's Church with a distant view of the river and a remarkable timber palisade crossing from bottom right to 1/3 up on the left. The pickets are exquisitly sharp as is the distant stone fort 4 miles off. This was on collodion plates. And dark clouds in the sky!
No mention of the camera but the lens was listed as: 2 inch portrait and landscape lenses & field f X 7 1/4-
His prints were 6X8
Regards
Bill

[tgtaylor]

Here's a descripion of the camera that glass-plate collodion photographers used in California prior to the early 1860's:

"...Cameras were little more than large, tripod-mounted boxes. A smaller accordion box in front of the larger box held a lens, and the photographers adjusted focus by covering the apparatus with a black cloth, ducking underneath, and sliding the accordion box in and out to compose an image that appeared upside down on a ground glass at the back of the large box. The photographer simply removed the lens cap, basing exposure on experience and intuition..." Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850 - 2000. Page 44.

Thomas