This is quickly becoming like the Monty python sketch with the Yorkshire men all one-upping each other regarding who had it hardest growing up.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
-Chris
Right! Our elderly parrot yet lives.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
seezee at Mercury Photo Bureau
seezee on Flickr
seezee's day-job at Messenger Web Design
Back in my day, you whippersnappers... we had to sensitize wet plates! Wasn't no "film." We didn't have exposure meters, so we had a trained monkey run out into the scene and tell us how bright it was out there. I saved up for thirty whole years to buy the first f/8 lens for whole plate!This is quickly becoming like the Monty python sketch with the Yorkshire men all one-upping each other regarding who had it hardest growing up.
Going back to can you ve should you?
Obviously you can, whether you should or not is up to you. I bought a beat up speed graphic a few years ago and used it quite often to shoot handheld. For me I bought the speed graphic so that I would have a very portable camera to make candid large format portraits with. I love the look of large format, but I also like the spontaneity and ability to shoot quickly that 35mm/120 allows, and the speed graphic was a great alternative to allow me to shoot LF in ways that a studio/field camera would not, specifically shooting my kids at play, friends ask we walked around town, and occasionally co-workers (firefighters) at work, though that project is now almost exclusively in studio now. With the speed graphic and 2 grafmatic backs that gave me 12 sheets of 4x5 that I could carry around in a regular camera bag designed for an SLR. I even adjusted the (then non working) rangefinder specifically to work with an 8" pentac, and even though it does not wok with other lenses, it gave me what I wanted, a handheld 4x5 portrait camera that I could still use by focusing on the GG for anything else.
I have since purchased an RB Series D that is even better suited for this purpose, given that it is an SLR and with a 12 shot "bag mag" only slightly larger, which led me to restore the Speed Graphic.
The point is that I had a purpose in mind, and shooting handheld was not only possible, but made sense for me. Had I instead been interested in shooting mostly landscapes or architecture, this would not have been the case. So if you have a speed graphic with a properly calibrated rangefinder then yes, shooting handheld is absolutely possible and can yield beautiful images. However, if what you plan on shooting does not require shooting hand held, and if you are worried about the possibility of "wasting" film by getting images that are occasionally out of focus or soft, then you are probably better off shooting with a tripod and focusing on the GG.
Bookmarks