Large-format camera movements (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Large-format camera movements (2020)

alexbond.com.au

100 pointsdsego36 comments

The dismissive comments (“you can just do this with focus-stacking” etc) are hilarious and totally miss the point.

Why sit in a boat on a lake fishing when you can buy fish sticks in any grocery store?

PS: if you’re interested in large-format photography, check out Nick Carver on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@nickcarverphoto

Well to be pedantic about it (going both ways), this method is far superior to focus stacking when you have a fairly linear transition in the field of focus. It is also really nice for shifts. Focus-stacking is a more general, in that you can place the focus wherever you choose and in any order. But for many landscape shots, these large-format movements produce an amazing depth of field that never falls in and out of focus, as is what you’ll get for focus stacking.

The catch is that it’s a technique that’s only usable for landscape photography. People already have an issue with rolling shutters anytime there’s a moving subject. For these movements, that much is a feature, not a bug.

Didn't see anything dismissive in the comments. The focus stacking comment resonated with me as just a practical solution. I loved my time with LF. 4x5, 57, and 8x10 are just amazing but unfortunately my health no longer allows me to carry around the camera/tripod/holders/cloth/etc. LF transparencies (including B&W) are just breathtaking. I also loved doing various antique processes with the big negatives as well.

LF photography is a unique experience. I wish every photographer could experience it.

I don’t think it takes very long before new photographers notice the fall-off of light/focus and sense of environment in LF, and even MF. It is a point of envy. You can’t replicate it in post. No megapixel count on a smaller sensor will recreate it, and high quality full-frame CMOS sensors are already pricey as they are. It seems that in this realm, film remains king.

And also QT Luong's site: https://www.largeformatphotography.info/

I love this analogy and it’s the same one I use when people dismissively ask me why I do Morse code, shoot film (including large format), print in the darkroom, listen to reel to reel tape, etc.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I’m an audio/video-focused software engineer. It’s that the best hobbies aren’t necessarily practical.

I worked as a photographer for years, from 35mm to 6x6 to 8x10 inches. Nothing I enjoyed more than the peace and concentration that working with a view camera gave me.

Seriously!! There’s something special about spending an afternoon taking photographs and only returning with half a dozen exposures. You really wanted to make every one count. And looking at that ground glass is like nothing else.

And then my favourite part was printing the photos by hand in the dark room. Total blissful, single-minded concentration. I don’t think I have felt more at peace than when I was printing.

Agreed - everything slows down and it is absolutely wonderful. The world through a view camera is a beauty in itself. I never got a chance to use a 8x10 but I imagine it is even more incredible.

I still have my Toyo 45AII tucked away. Last I checked the prices for film + processing were too much to justify it mind you.

processing film yourself, even large format, is fairly cheap and easy, and adds another dimension of control and creativity. i really recommend it.

you will spend more on film than chemistry. i think it's worth it, given that modern digital cameras are still mostly incapable of that kind of work.

Depends on the film. Ilford with home processing comes out to $2.50-$3.00 a negative. Certainly not cheap, but it doesn't deter me from making a dozen or so exposures a month.

Ah, the old Schienflug shuffle... I rarely ever corrected perspective distortion even though I took a lot of pictures of buildings. I can only think of a handful of times I changed the focus plane and some of those were for a tabletop assignment at school. What I used a lot of was the shift, rise, and fall. Of course the only reason those were so useful is because the camera was such a pain in the ass to move around to reframe. Oh, and make sure you aren't using some fancy telephoto lens with its focal point out in front if you want to do front movements! They tend to have pretty small coverage so the amount of movements would be limited in any case I suppose.

Now that architecture and tabletop photography are no longer dominated by large format I'm not sure how much sense it makes to spend extra money for more movements on your camera. The most common uses for LF photography these days are landscape and portraiture. Landscape photos will need, at most, fairly modest movements and portraits not at all. Most LF photographers these days would be fine with a graflex or other type of more or less a box with a lens camera.

Of course if you really do want to go nuts with movements, monorail cameras have never been cheaper!

Similarly, the past situations where I've wished I had lens tilt available (to give the appearance of greater depth of field), were I taking those shots today I'd probably be looking at using focus stacking instead.

>"The most common uses for LF photography these days are landscape and portraiture."

That large format landscape photo from the article with "infinite depth" is quite interesting.

Isn’t pretty much all infinity focus infinite depth?

No. Focus distance is very different than depth of field. If your film plane is perpendicular, it is very easy to have things very close to you be outside of the depth of field and so be blurry. Tilting the lens tilts the plane of focus so can encompass things very close to you on the ground. Of course that will make things at the top go out of focus so you have to be careful.

The hardest large-format camera movement: carrying it around.

Louis Mendes will disagree with that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8KOAj6Caf4

Some are really portable - I used to travel with a crown graphic, which folds down small and light. You can do tilt shift with - it’s only in one axis but that’s plenty, as the camera is light enough you can rotate it.

The heavy bit was all the dark slides and film.

Press cameras like Speed and Crown Graphics were designed be used handheld. The tradeoff is indeed more restricted movements compared to a view or field camera.

But the real killer for portability with a field camera is that you need a pretty good tripod. I've got a Manfrotto 3033 for my Wista VX, and I've carried the whole kit around on my bike. But it's not easy.

A view camera is generally only going to be used in a studio--portability is not much of a concern.

Whew, I carried that tripod around when I was younger, it's a killer.

In art school I took a lot of large format photos of industrial facilities at night, which often involved climbing chain-link fences with a huge pelican case and tripod. Totally worth it for the end results, and looking like a quaint old timey photographer was helpful the few times I was confronted by security guards. :)

This sounds really interesting. I'd love to see your work if it's available online somewhere.

There’s none of it online anymore. Another life.

I switched from APS-C to MFT because it was too bulky. These days the camera stays at home often.

I've got two large format cameras.

One is a Horseman L45 which is a monstrosity that has a rail. It can only be used on my largest of heads (a bogen 3047 head).

My other large format camera is a Horseman HD field camera.

While the L45 is a beautiful camera, it is, by itself, a 10 lb camera that can only really be carried in a suitcase sized hard case that supports the rail properly. (Not my camera - but it gives you an idea - https://www.ebay.com/itm/364081119414 ).

The HD field camera is the one I'd take lug around in a slightly oversized messenger bag. http://www.bnphoto.org/bnphoto/LFN/CamProf_Horseman1.htm

The front standard of the HD had some reasonable movements. There was also a FA ("fine art" rather than "heavy duty") one that had a little bit of rear standard movement but was a bit heavier and less rugged.

My favorite use for the HD camera was doing a in field polaroid transfer onto a watercolor paper postcard which then got a stamp on it and went into a mailbox or giving it to a person who was interested in it as I took the photograph. These were necessarily a one of a kind image as the process was destructive to the polaroid. I might still have one in a book of watercolor paper as I was working on learning the process at Fort Point (hallway, 2nd floor, south side of the building, shooting west) as that was a place that was often quiet enough to photograph without disturbance and the staff was amenable to a photographer with a tripod.

In all seriousness, I recommend lifting weights. Once I discovered how much an 8x10 field camera, accessories, and a suitable tripod weighed, I realized I'd only be able to schlep it around if I started building muscle mass.

An unusual article to see on the HN front page :)

But enjoyable, I was out two days ago with my 4x5 Speed Graphic, using the Lomo Instax back that arrived almost 18 months ago and only just using properly. It takes me ages to get enough time and headspace to work with view cameras, but it really is well worth the time.

I broadly recommend the Lomo back to anyone with a Graflok back and little prep time - it takes longer to shoot with as there's an adaptor to shift the glass back to the instant film plane, then the whole lot needs to be replaced with the Lomo back to shoot. But you get the picture immediately, and no faff with loading and unloading film holders.

In the interim, there's my Rollei SL66 armed with a metering finder gives me the speed of a view camera and the Scheimpflug movement to boot.

But, like others have mentioned, the hardest part is lugging all the kit around, my enthusiasm for that has definitely waned over the last 30 years.

I have the Lomo back for my Speed, but i haven’t quite figured out how to manage exposure outdoors. The 800 iso is almost too fast for the old synchro-computer shutter I’ve got on it. Indoors, it works okay with a press 25 flash.

Yes, outdoors has been horrible, haven't nailed this yet I feel. Indoors is fine. I'm not at all familiar with Instax wide and it's been twenty-plus years since I touched Instax mini, I suspect odd response curves but it's not going to be cheap to test. Fun, though.

Synchro-compur. Stupid autocorrect.

How have you found focus and framing accuracy to be with the Instax back? I'm planning on picking one up for my Speed Graphic to use with various high speed lenses (Kodak Aero Ektar etc.) and I hope it's up to the task.

Heh, well, that was the main reason it took over a year for me to get around to doing any serious damage with it. The focus was out originally and my graflok is slightly broken so it took some fettling and frequent checking with a vernier to ensure that everything was indeed lined up. Now it seems to be better, but I'm sticking to f8-f22. Instax is approximately ISO 800-1000 so finding a high enough shutter speed to use wide open with a high speed lens will inevitably make focus crazy critical. Framing is fine, the adapter handles that.

Canon do some nice (but expensive!) tilt-shift lenses if anyone wants to play with a rental.

https://www.canon.ie/lenses/ef-tilt-and-shift/

In fluid mechanics we use a stroboscopic technique called Particle Image Velocimetry. The basic idea is a pulsed laser sheet illuminates a slice of a flow seeded with aerosol and we track the particles with a camera to capture the flow field. There is also stereo PIV where we exploit the scheimpflug effect to focus add axes two cameras to obtain three velocity components in a 2D slice.

Sorta related - an alternative to moving the heavy lens etc is to move everything else:

RobotEye from https://www.ocularrobotics.com/technology/

> Current RobotEye models are simultaneously capable of: Extremely high rates of acceleration, up to 100,000°/s², Reaching aperture speeds of up to 10,000°/s, Pointing precision of 0.02°

Wow! The how-to photos & layout look great.

Definitely worth a look, even if, like me, you're not planning on ever using a large format camera.

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