Is answering a light-hearted post with a personal attack really appropriate here?
Must be the water - between personal attacks and the dichroic fog from changing pH, I don't know what to do ...
No offense meant to anyone. I do hope that on this forum we comment on photography, not personality. Disagreement is fine. Neil is a local friend and I wanted to tweak him a bit. He can take it, so can I. Anyway, the Bach b minor mass is the greatest piece of music ever written, not that pathetic Mozart c minor. So there! That proves it.
For architectural photography, lenses can never have enough coverage, and cameras can never have enough movements. * With shorter and wider lenses, a bag bellows can sometimes be a necessity. Make sure your camera can take one.
So be careful not to limit yourself inadvertently.
Among lenses of the same length, some are designed to give much greater coverage than average. You should look for those. They often have 'wide' or 'super' or 'W' in their names. Forum members can steer you to tables which show coverage of lenses. Someone here might even have one for sale.
Inexpensive used monorail cameras support adjustments and movements limited only by the bellows and/or the lens, but many wooden field cameras - while portable and beautiful to look at - do not.
One need not purchase new lenses, or new cameras. Over the years, most lenses have improved only marginally - often in ways of greater benefit to the manufacturer, than noticeable by users.
* Reminiscent of Carl Weese's observation that just as one can never be "too rich, or too thin", one can never have enough film holders.
This is much more true in the large format world. People using other formats seem fixated on the newest lens because manufacturers there are continuing to improve things like coatings, focusing motors, vibration reduction and zoom lens design. Most modern (<50 years old) LF lenses are already coated with something and the last three items don't apply.
Roger Hicks, speaking about composition, said somewhere something like - "it's all about the focal length and the film format" Not entirely precise either as the inner components in the picture itself are equally important for a composition.
- Most Excellent -
If I've learned anything on this forum, it's that nothing is all about anything
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