Something that I realised shortly after seeing my first medium format negative, is that if there’s anything better than film, it’s BIGGER film. The formats above 120 roll film fascinate me, and I once had the privilege of chatting to someone who routinely (or as routinely as one can do such a thing) shot 10×8 transparencies. I was in Adorama trying to decide whether to buy a Nikon F90x or not (I did), and she was buying 10×8 darkslides. It was quite a long chat, because the darkslides were in that bit of the stockroom that exists in all such places, a place everyone sort of remembers, but can never find again, or at least not within half an hour.
Rather typically I forgot to ask for contact details, or offer my own, sadly.
In any case, I wanted to offer a couple of links related to large format and view cameras that have crossed my path recently.
The first is this post at Mrs. Deane’s blog, concerning
“some tests with the 8×10 camera and a collection of superheavy portrait lenses we collected for the sole reason that they were cheap, fast and no one else seemed to want them at the time.”
That sentence alone confirms them as our kind of people, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Secondly, this short series of youtube videos, showing an interview with Alec Soth in which he talks about how he works, and the way he uses his large format camera in portraiture.
It all seems a bit distancing to me (although for Soth, that’s part of what he’s trying to convey),
and if I’m absolutely honest, rather a faff. But then, 10×8 transparencies…
I’ve been using a 4×5 camera for a little while now and they’re great fun to use! It is a hassle to carry around all the time though! I’d dearly love a Deardorff 10×8 to shoot tintypes on instead of my Speed Graphic.
You might like this link for plates http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/bestvintage/multimedia_vid2.html
what is ‘a faff’?
Oooh 10×8 transparencies, now there’s a thing to ponder…..
Nolan, “faff” is a British colloquialism, used both as noun and verb.
In this context, I’m using it as a noun to indicate a series of small, slightly annoying, time consuming tasks. As a verb, it tends to mean to behave irritatingly indecisively, e.g. “It took ages to take the portrait, because the photographer spent twenty minutes under a hood faffing about.”
I’d love to have a go with some large format stuff.
Maybe when the student loan comes through.
I can’t any of it making it’s way to be spent on things realted to studying.
Ah! Got it!
And Mathew, I’m doing the same thing soon. I’ve been seeing a lot of 8×10 negatives/contact prints and they are incredible. It’s hard to go back.
I think it’s the closeness to painting which really attracts me, process-wise. It’s possibly a bit distancing, but there’s a lot of work I want to do which calls for that, I think.