What is the most movement youve ever used?

[Todd West]

Unlike most posters, I regularly hit the limits of coverage on all my lenses
(image circles of 216 to 336mm) and have been known to use a 6x7 reducing back to get more movement than is available with 4x5. For image circles around 220mm that usually means minor amounts of tilt and swing, plus as much rise or fall as the lens can handle. The larger circles support enough rise and fall that tilt or swing usually becomes the limiting factor.



The most movement I've ever used was around 50 degrees of tilt with three inches of rise and about 20 degrees of swing. That was on a near 1:1 macro and I needed the reducing back since the roughly 550mm image circle didn't cover 4x5 with that much movement.



I've not found there to be too much of an issue with large movements, other than the need to compensate for off axis light falloff on the lens as well as light loss due to bellows extension. The former is a controversial subject; see the thread on this at photo.net; http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-...?msg_id=005mUV.

[Richard Urmonas]

I have run out of adjustement on my Linhof Techinka 4x5 on two occasions. One was photographing a building which was on a steep sided hill. The camera position was below building ground level. The other time was photographing a series of cascades from the top and trying ot keep everything from top to bottom in focus including both river banks.

[Paul Metcalf]

Full tilts (front and back) once with Wisner 4x5 Tech Field and a Nikor 450mm.. Had a field of tulips in foreground and a tall barn in the background (a few hundred yards away but still at infinity focus). I wanted to fill the frame with a near tulip and have the barn as a slightly larger than full-frame backdrop. I shot some frames with the background purposely out-of-focus but the frame with near and far in-focus is the most striking. Without tilts, I needed at least f/128 (dv was well over 10mm) which was a bit into diffraction limit, as well as too long of exposure. With tilts, I got it down to f/64 (dv around 10mm) and fast enough to keep wind movement out of picture. Most other times only require a bit of front tilt. I shift (up/down) on most shots.

[jantman]

I currently have no tripod head for LF. I use all the movement I can.

Once or twice I remember using up most of the movement on my 810N, but that was probably either because my tripod lacked a head, or one of those damn (rivers/mountains/cliffs/etc) was in the way.

[Scott Walton]

In the studio, I use front and especially rear tilts and swings but generally shooting outside for my own personal stuff, I don't need them most of the time (unless there is a building or flag pole ect.). When shooting products for work, I need to make sure the products look realistic and true, naturally. Boxes and other things need to look like a square or rectangle without converging lines and back tilts and shifts are needed

[Sandy Sorlien]

Now, tell me if this is the stupidest question you've ever heard, but why do we need swing? Why is it even on the camera? I regularly shoot long streetscapes with diminishing perspective. When I first started doing this, I used swing to lessen the size difference between the near buildings and far ones. Then I realized it was easier to just rotate the tripod head to align the film plane closer to the subject plane, and use shift to bring the subject back into the frame. Doesn't that do exactly the same thing?

(My answer to your question is: For streetscapes and building "portraits," I use up to 10 degrees of rise and/or shift, with a tiny bit of tilt to keep the building tops from looming; that's about it.)

Cheers, Sandy

[Frank Petronio]

Sandy, you use swing the same way that you might tilt the front standard to hold focus from foreground to background in a landscape. Only sideways. So by swinging slightly towards your street front, the nearest door and the furthest door could both be in focus even with a large aperture. Shifting as you do works fine, just consider trying abit of front swing to hold focus.

[Lars Åke Vinberg]

This fall I photographed in an aspen meadow using my 8x10 and 150XL. The closest aspens were very close to the camera, so I had to use full rise, about 4" rise, to keep the trees parallel and inside the frame.

Every now and then I make more extreme near-far compositions, using 47XL on 6x9cm or 4x5", requiring more aggressive rear tilt or front tilt with front fall. Sometimes 20 degrees of front tilt has not been enough.

But the above are extreme cases, normally for landscape a few degrees of tilt/swing and a little shift/rise/fall is all that is required.