My B&H order came in Friday, so I pulled out my Bender 4x5, swabbed down all my film holders, discovered I still had two loaded with some Kodak Portra VC 160, and one of them was exposed! I loaded up the other film holders with Kodak TMax, got all my gear in order, and... set foot out of my house. I'm actually feeling pretty rotten today, so I didn't stray any farther than my back yard. But we have a beautiful garden spider on the back fence, and it was very patient with me as I did my best to re-learn how to use my camera. I'm out of practice!
I didn't want to leave the film holder half-exposed, so I went back inside and set up a studio shot that would require camera movements. In honor of the friend who sewed my Rokkaku sail, I covered a table with the unused ripstop from that project, and scattered a bunch of other kite making supplies and tools on the cloth. I plunked the tripod and camera down in front of the mess I'd just made and started to arrange.
There's something completely different about using a large format camera. You don't have a viewfinder. You don't have an LCD screen. You have a ground glass that's letting you see the very light that's passing through the lens in front of you. Everything is upside-down and backward, and even the simplest scene takes on qualities of an abstract painting rather than a photograph. Things become shapes, arrangements of shapes become washes of color, and the picture is a palette to be changed, shifted, recombined, and ordered. I find it easier to practice the compositional side of photography with a large format camera than with any other kind.
I also found out I'm incredibly rusty when it comes to camera movements! If you've never run into a large format camera the term "movements" may not make sense. Here's the quick and dirty on camera movements:
If you have a lens and focus it onto a screen that is perpendicular to the optical axis, you are bringing a single plane into focus, some distance from your lens. Shift the lens away from your screen and the plane of perfect focus moves closer to you. Shift your lens toward your screen and that plane of perfect focus moves away from you.
But what if you're photographing something that stretches from your feet all the way to infinity? Say you're standing in a field of wildflowers and want them all to be in tack-sharp focus? What then? If focus is the only movement you have available, you put your focus at some midway point and stop down your aperture until the near and far focus are acceptable. In the world of 35mm and digital photography, this is the only option you have. (Unless you have a TS lens, but I'll get to that later...)
Not so with a large format camera. If the optical axis of your lens is not perpendicular to your focusing screen, a strange thing happens: you can actually tilt your plane of perfect focus. Tilt the lens enough and you can bring that entire field of wildflowers into perfect tack-sharp focus. Things above or below the level of the field will be out of focus, but the field itself will be in focus from your feet out to infinity. This movement is called "tilt".
Most large format cameras allow for both tilt and swing. Swing is similar to tilt except it rotates the lens from side to side. Perfect if you're photographing the side of a building at some oblique angle. Some large format cameras allow tilts and swings on both the front (the lens) and the back (the film plane).
Another useful movement the large format camera offers is shift. Let's say you're photographing a tall building. If you tilt your camera up to get it in the frame, the sides of the building will appear to be converging. But let's say you really want that building to have completely parallel sides with the horizontals completely horizontal and the verticals completely vertical. If you're using a 35mm or digital camera, you don't have much choice. You either point the camera up and live with the convergence, or you don't get to photograph the top of the building.
On a large format camera you can typically shift your lens up, down, or side to side. Provided your lens board and film plane are parallel to the side of the building, your verticals will be vertical and your horizontals will be horizontal, regardless of how you position your lens. Shift it up, and you can photograph the entire face of the building in one frame without causing the verticals to converge. Most large format monorail cameras allow shifts on the front and back, though most field cameras only offer shifts on the front. Either way works.
So for this shot I used a lot of tilt in order to get the entire table into tack-sharp focus. I wound up using a little front rise, too, to get things positioned just the way I wanted. I then spent a sweaty twenty minutes under the dark cloth focusing and re-focusing and re-re-focusing with a 30x loupe while I tweaked the tilt. Yes, it should be a lot easier than that. I'm just rusty.
Unfortunately I haven't developed either picture yet. My darkroom is, like many starving artist amateur photographers, my bathroom. No matter how carefully I try to light-seal the door, it still leaks light during the day. Nighttime is another matter, though. If everything works out I should be able to develop both pictures tonight and scan them in the morning. To be honest I'd be surprised if either one comes out ok. It really has been a long long time. And with a 10-second exposure on the studio shot, there's really no telling. Pinholes in the bellows, light leaks at the lens board or film back, or any number of other gotchas and goof-ups could cost one or both pictures. Time will tell.
In any case, it's good to be back in the swing of things. My next task is to find some good subjects for black and white photography!
Tom
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