All,

My apologies if posted before, but planning a vacation has me pondering.

Question: What is it about Large Format photography that makes you do it? It's not convenient or fast or inexpensive or discrete or any number of things...yet you keep going back....

Caveat: And no, I don't mean in terms of technical debates of LF versus 35 mm or digital, blah, blah, blah...

Example: While taking a Monument Valley 4x5 image some years back, I remember the extensive time I spent composing, setting up, adjusting, deciding, focusinj, bracketing...all while a dozen families zoomed by only to fall out of a rental car, snap-snap-snap-snap, fall back in the car, and off they go without have spent even a minute really seeing the landscape while they are physically a part of it. Each time I now see the resulting print on the wall, it's not just an image I see.. but all the memories I recall from that experience. (...and the cigarette butts I removed from the foreground, so okay I cheated and cleaned the image.)

Thanks!

Robt.