Newsletter question

I've been thinking about newletters ltely. I used to subscribe to the Zone VI newlestter a long time ago and having just gotten back into photography and LF, I was wondering if there was a newletter that would be helpful to me. I have experience in taking photos and developing film, but the large format thing is fairly new. In an effort to help understand the format and improve technique, can anyone recomend more reading material?

I uinderstand that a lot of you are going to suggest that getting out and taking pictures is the best way to learn, but I'm looking for more than that. I have a decebnt eye (or so I'm told), I understand the basics of the zone system (although a refresher would be good - I'll have to dig out the books I have buried and re-read them) and camera movements. What I would like is some real world stoires, some tips and hints that might be a long time coming without a mentor.

Thnaks Dan

You can subscribe one publication here just like the Fred Picker's ZoneVI newsletter:-

http://fineartphotosupply.com/

Sorry to piggy-back with a quasi-related question, but this got me thinking. Does anyone know who owns the rights to the Zone VI newsletter? I was just thinking it might be cool to have the contents all put into a single hardbound volume and have a short-run book published. Just a thought.

Here are some books that might be helpful

LargeFormat Natre Photography by Jack Dykinga

User's Guide to the View Camera by Jim Stone

Using the View Camera that I wrote

WWW.APUG.ORG has a large format forum as does this site (as you've discovered)

www.viewcamera.com has a forum and several articles in the Free Articles section

steve simmons

Zone VI was bought by Calumet in the early 90s. I do not know what happended to the back issues of the newsletter

Here are some books that might be helpful

LargeFormat Nature Photography by Jack Dykinga

User's Guide to the View Camera by Jim Stone

Using the View Camera that I wrote

WWW.APUG.ORG has a large format forum as does this site (as you've discovered)

www.viewcamera.com has a forum and several articles in the Free Articles section

steve simmons

Zone VI was bought by Calumet in the early 90s. I do not know what happended to the back issues of the newsletter

I, too, subscribed to The Zone VI Newsletter, and found it very helpful at the time. This is a different time, however. I believe the discourse between photographers found on various sites such as this one, APUG.org, and michaelandpaula.com is even more helpful - and update every day.

I too was a subsciber to the newsletters and got allot out of them. Unfortunately I lent them to a student years ago and never got them back. I happen to think though that this forum and others like VC are a superior form for information because you can ask endless good and even stupid questions and get useful answers (not all the time! but usually!). Did you ever write Picker with a question and get the "rubber stamp" answer back?

The cumulative experience of the participants of these forums pales Pickers to insignificance.

Hey! I bought those rubber stamps for Fred! I got three, which corresponded to his typical in-office responses to most of the letters he received. One said "TRY IT!" (which people rarely did, or even wanted to do), another said "It Doesn't Matter" (because often what they were asking about didn't matter to either their technical acumen or resulting pictures) and the last, biggest one said "BULLS**T", except all the letters were there (because many made adamant assertions that were precisely that).

We never meant Fred to use only the rubber stamps in reply, and mostly he didn't. Sometimes, however, he went a little overboard. I think he loved to press them into the ink pad. In fact, he was the best of us at remembering that these writers had a similar, abiding love for photography, and deserved our respect even if their questions seemed a little goofy to us. But sometimes he, too, would lose it.

Fred, as we all know, was unique. We're unlikely to see another Fred, and in some ways that's OK. On the other hand, he pretty much single-handedly resuscitated large format photography in the 1980s, so we all owe him a debt of gratitude.