Large Format Photography

My Toyo 45AX field camera and Rodenstock 150mm Apo-Sironar-S arrived a couple of days ago. Wow, such names, such resonances with greats such as A Adams etc.. What on earth am I doing buying this stuff?

There are a couple of reasons I want to get involved in large format photography.

a) Curiosity. Lets get the trivial out of the way first. I've been interested in photography for a long time, I have lots of cameras of different sorts. I like to find out what it means to use a camera of a particular type - to find out what it's characteristics are, how these influence the photographs that people make with them. Gary Winogrands Leicas, Willy Ronis Rolleiflex, Ansel Adams 4x5. This is a strange kind of ethnography and doesn't really relate to my own photography. It's a bit like wondering what it was like for Beethoven to be deaf.

b) Project. I have a project I would like to do, and it seems to me that an LF camera is the best solution. I will be doing architectural and landscape work. The images will be conceived mainly with the print in mind, and I intend to print quite large. So, detail is important. For me LF is the easiest and cheapest way to get the detail and quality I need - MF digital is way beyond my budget and I'm not sure it would even rival the tonal possibilities of LF film. Architectural subjects, and certain landscapes will need the unique possibilities given by camera movements. Only view cameras offer this type of control - film or digital.

My budget is constrained, but I could see that a new, quality field camera and a couple of lenses was actually relatively inexpensive compared with the new digital offerings. I'm comfortable with film processing and scanning, so I decided to go for it. On this blog I'll try and document this voyage of discovery, with it's inevitable challenges, and hopefully some success stories.