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Camera
View cameras are the most flexible cameras, usually made from a
basic design that has not changed for over 100 years. You know the
guy in the old time photo studio who photographs with his head
under a cloth? He's using a view camera. Edward Weston? He took
most of his best photos with an 8x10" view camera. All those
luscious ads for food in magazines? Taken with view cameras.
A view camera is fundamentally a light-tight box with a slot at one
end for a lens and a slot at the other for the film. You compose and
focus your image on a groundglass, then displace the glass with a sheet of film in a film holder.
The lens and film aren't fixed parallel to each other. This
opens up a huge range of creative opportunities that are
unavailable to most photographers. For example, if you
want to take a photo of a building, the obvious thing to
do is point the camera up towards the center of the
structure. However, this results in projecting the vertical
exterior of the building onto the angled film surface.
The lines of the building will converge towards the top
of the frame. A view camera allows you to keep the
camera level with the ground and either shift the lens up
or the film down. The film is now "looking up" at the
building through the lens, but the film is still parallel to
the building exterior so lines don't converge.
If you're taking a picture of rocks in a stream with a
view camera, you can achieve sharper focus by tilting
the lens forward a bit. This will get the Scheimpflug
Rule working for you: the planes of the subject, the lens,
and the film should all intersect in a line. You can
achieve the same result by leaving the lens fixed and
tilting the film standard back a bit. This will improve the
focus and also increase the relative prominence of nearby rocks since they will be stretched out onto the
film.
If you want to understand view cameras, you can start by reading B&H Photo's introduction to large
format and the standard textbook on the topic: View Camera Technique. I provide some view camera
sample images in my FlashPix References Images collection.
Above: the very first image that I made with a view camera, back in 1981. I was a 17-year-old
undergraduate at MIT taking an intro photography course (the only one I've ever taken). We had old
cheap metal view cameras, loaded Tri-X, and developed the film and prints ourselves.
http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/camera (3 of 9)7/3/2005 2:22:21 AM