Hattiesburg, Headed West!

Hey, gang. I figured I'd go ahead and share my testimony for large format. I started off with photography about 2, maybe 3 years ago now? I immediately fell in love with landscape photography, seeing the work of Ansel Adams. I took to hiking about, shooting hills and valleys which we don't have in Southern Mississippi. I found my ancient DSLR with about 4 MP a little lacking in resolution for landscapes, and the kit lens not sharp enough. I soon upgraded to a Canon T7, which I use to shoot most of my work. Even that was a little underwhelming for the type of landscapes I wanted to shoot. I still wanted to be able to blow my images up to a ridiculous amount and the digital sensor was horrible about collecting dust and specks, which limited me to around f/5.6 for landscapes. Late last fall, I heard about large format photography and immediately fell in love with the idea. The only thing stopping me was, well, the cost. I took the plunge slowly and sometime in January I took my first large format photograph. It was actually a self portrait of myself and some others, so I composed the photograph and did everything, but had a helper take the actual image. I've completely fallen in love with the process since then. I recently returned from a large format road trip across the entirety of the southwest. I didn't mean to go as far as I did but I had a couple accidental detours and ended up hitting every state, as well as a couple in the midwest. Digital photography seems a bit lacking, now. Good lenses are so much more expensive, and you don't get those sweet sweet movements. Digital has become more of a burden to me than an art, as snobby as that sounds, but it feels so limiting compared to large format now.

God Bless,
John P Garriga

John, thanks for sharing your story. I look forward to seeing some of your work. Have you set up a darkroom yet? Will you be making silver-gelatin or other wet-process prints, or going the digital route? (Hint: silver printing is fun and rewarding. Like film photography and LF in particular, it takes some learning and experimenting to get good results. Great results many of us are still working to achieve.

Welcome!

What one learns by working in large format will also helps when one is using smaller formats and/or digital. As a tool, LF becomes a grand teacher.

Have fun!

Thanks, @Ulophot ! I look forward to getting some of it back. I'm actually working on getting a darkroom set up currently. I have some equipment to use, just need the chemistry at the moment and the chance to learn how to develop. I never did 35mm. I got a 120mm after 4x5 but I just use that to shoot experimental colour film, really. I haven't got any clue as to how to develop colour, or the precision to do so. I have some x-ray film I need to cut to size and I believe that's what I'll use to start experimenting with development and such. Right now I'm going to be making digital prints of my images since I got pretty comfortable with the workflow of Photoshop but I hope to be doing wet-prints soon!

@Vaughn , you wouldn't be the same from APUG would you? I remember you helping me out a lot when I was trying to figure out what to buy, first learning the process! Thanks a lot for that, by the way. Really did fall in love with this, feel like I actually understand what's going on when I press the button more than earlier.