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Musings on: the lure of large format photography

I’m postings these musings – and this is the first of them – mainly to produce an history of the direction my photography takes over time; it’s my record essentially, something I can refer back to and marvel at how wrong I was. The intent is that I can reread these at some unspecified, future date, and see how my thinking has changed over time. If they provoke thought in anyone reading them, so much the better! And if I do reread them – it’s entirely possible I won’t, given my past dabbling in the writing of diaries and subsequent lack of ever having reviewed them – it will have been a worthwhile use of time. I also find it’s rather useful in clarifying thoughts to actually write them down, so let’s see if this works.

Two years ago, the most photographic equipment I ever carried around was a small, light – let’s call it highly convenient – compact digital camera. Prior to that, I’d generally carried a compact camera and some slide film. Now, after twenty months of using a dSLR, I find that not only am I already hauling about 10Kg of ‘stuff’ up and down hills, but I’m alarmingly drawn towards lugging around a large format camera – quite possibly in addition to the existing kit. This causes me some degree of consternation!

The appeal of large format to me is mainly the image quality and the nature of the compositional control they provide, but also, I’ll confess, since they’re rather nice objects: they look like ‘proper’ cameras, what with the bellows and the black cloth to shield the ground glass from the sun. They’re ‘serious‘ cameras! Then there are all the beautifully-engineered knobs and worm screws which lock down the camera and allow precise control of where exactly the plane of focus is, and what the perspective is doing. And that comes back to function: the movements provide the ability to design an image with just the focus that will suit it, and with perspective distortion removed if that will enhance the result further. It all adds up to an entertaining device to use and a great tool for making landscape images.

But then there are the downsides. They’re relatively bulky; setting up a shot takes a fair bit of time (OK – Ansel Adams’ ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico‘ was relatively brisk; I’ll grant that); no instant feedback, since they use film; all the extra post-processing steps involved in film (developing and scanning, re-scanning the less-than-perfect scan…); I’m sure there are more. I’m optimistic that these will keep me LF-free, but not utterly convinced. Oh! And there’s the additional problem that pesky, SLR-types come and ask you for demonstrations when you’re trying to set up a shot – I know this, I’ve been the pesky SLR-type. And lastly: will large format film be available indefinitely?

At the moment, I’m comfortably on the don’t go there side of the metaphorical line, but a year ago it would never have remotely occurred to me to consider acquiring such an archaic and arcane piece of kit. Is this a slippery slope, or will my recent purchase of a 24mm PC-E lens, enabling tilt and shift – though only in one plane, and an LCD screen is not remotely as good as ground glass to compose on, so there is considerably less flexibility than a large format camera – will this lens mollify the allure of LF? Or will it show me what can be done with camera movements, and move me even closer to the LF ‘edge’?

The trouble is, I recognise, and have been told, that I already have something of a large format approach to making photographs: I tend to spend non-trivial amounts of time setting shots up and tweaking the composition and focus, and then I wait for the light to be just as I want it (well, in reality, I take several shots of the same thing whilst waiting, since I’m using digital capture, but I know that this habit is, at least in part, to kill time!). Going out and making just one or two compositions in a session seems fine to me; and this, it could be argued, is not making the best use of the possibilities offered by SLRs. i.e. I don’t compose through the viewfinder – at least I often don’t – and I can readily live without autofocus.

And then there’s medium format of course. Not as good as LF in terms of absolute quality, and without the inherent ‘movements’ capability, but better than 35mm and its digital equivalents. I think I can safely say that I’d move to medium format immediately if it weren’t for the fact that digital backs are so alarmingly expensive right now. Trouble is, they really are expensive; and, given that fact, the affordable option for me is medium format film, which comes with most of the downsides of LF film, but without the absolute quality jump LF gives…. nor the movements… which leads straight back to going the whole five miles, as they say, and giving LF a try.

For the time being, I’m sticking with a dSLR and hoping that medium format digital backs will come down in price, but I do wonder how long I’ll be able to resist LF. Oh dear, heading back to the 19th century here…

Your thoughts? Am I doomed?

The making of: ‘Twisleton hawthorn’

These blog things, they came about as on-line diaries, so I think I’ll start with that approach, except that I’ll write a few short items about how I made particular images – diaries of images; and, for want of a better starting point, I’ll talk about the one I’ve used as a banner.

I’ve entitled this image various things over the year or so it’s existed, and in its various forms. Now, I just tend to call it ‘Twisleton hawthorn’, it being arguably the most prominent and interesting tree on Twisleton Scar End, in the Yorkshire Dales, and also being a hawthorn. The other titles have tended to have the word ‘stormy’ in them, since it was; very! Seconds after I took this image, the skies did that ‘opening’ thing you hear about and I was rapidly rather damp. The other reason I thought I’d describe the making of this image is that it was one of the first ‘good’ photographs I took after moving from taking holiday snapshots, and pictures high up on glaciated mountains, to buying a dSLR and attempting to make something a little more than snaps. I’d taken a couple of other nice images a few days earlier (the first one on my Flickr stream), but those were pure luck: the light happened to be good one morning, and I had coincidentally woken up early (not that the latter is at all common, so I was doubly lucky!).

So, this was the very first time I’d gone out, newly-acquired camera kit in hand, looking for something I could make a good image from. That was the wrong term at the time though: I thought of it as ‘going out to take a photo’. I wasn’t remotely considering the possibilities of post-processing it once I’d ‘taken it’, and I wasn’t thinking of ‘capturing light’ or ‘making an image’. As a direct result of that, this photo has improved through its various incarnations as I’ve learned how to process files better – at least, I think it has… That, I feel, will be another theme of this blog: my development in technique and approach, as I progressed through the stages of making images and, I hope, of my continued progression. I started by just heading out with a camera, and now I tend to try to pre-visualise images and then go out looking for landscapes which I can use to make what I’m looking for.

Back to this image then. I’d headed up onto Twisleton Scar End, somewhere I’m reasonably sure I’d never been before, since I knew that there were both limestone pavement and a few trees up there, and thought that they must be good to ‘take photos of’. Having wandered around looking at all the trees, taking the odd shot (well, quite a lot of odd shots in fact; none of them terribly good), I decided that this tree was the best of the bunch. I’d then taken endless images of it from all directions, none of which looked especially gripping on the LCD screen of my Nikon D90. I proved myself right there; they weren’t.

Then, just as I had put everything back in the bag, turned away from the tree, and started to walk back down to the car across the tricky limestone pavement, the sun suddenly emerged from the cloud behind which it had been lurking and made me flinch away from the glare. Doing so, I could see that the rather drab tree I’d spent the previous half hour looking at was now glowing with light; completely transformed! Now, a year or so later, I know how suddenly things change, and I know how much difference that makes to an image; then, despite years on high mountains, I didn’t appreciate either the drama or the speed with which this can happen. I attribute this lack of realisation before to the fact that, slogging up some alpine peak, I’ve tended to focus rather more on where my feet and axe are going than on the delicate play of light on the snow and other, more artistic, features of the terrain!

I quickly pulled the camera out, half knelt down, rested an elbow on a knee for stability, and took half a dozen shots before the rain started and the sun disappeared again. This was the best. More precisely, this was the one which was in focus and didn’t show much camera movement! Taken as a jpeg, it was quite dramatic, but not as good as I’d hoped. It’s improved since then; I’ve reprocessed it around three or four times, going back and tweaking the files each time I learnt something new about post-processing. The best version is that I’ve posted here I think; I like the extra foreground compared to the more elongated version necessary for the blog banner.

This has been a thoroughly educational image for me. Whilst taking it, I learnt the importance of predicting the light and of using a tripod. Since then, I’ve learnt how much difference can be made from careful processing, as well as the fact that having a RAW format version in the first place would have helped a great deal. I’m rather hoping I won’t modify it again from now on, but there’s always the option. Do comment to let me know if you think it could be improved!

A larger version of this image can be seen here on my Flickr stream.

My first post!

My first post. This blog will, when I start it properly, be about my photography and the process I go through in making images. It’s driven by the fact that I finally got my act together and produced a ‘proper’ site on which to display my images, and that’s here http://www.mikegreenimages.co.uk/ .

Once I’ve worked out what will make this interesting, I’ll be posting regularly!