james_baird

Y'know, in all these film vs. digital shoutfests, I never seem to hear any discussion of the

reason why I still drag out my TLR on occaision, and have recently got into 4x5 - it has

(virtually) nothing to do with the resolution ( I very rarely print above 8.5x11), and

everything to do with the size of the sensor. Frankly, my experiences with my 10D leave

me with very little patience anymore for the "romance" of film, but the 3D look I get (at

least with an OOF background; when stopping down not so much) on a large piece of film

is something I find just can't be replicated with a small sensor, whether emulsion-based or

digital. (And please, don't talk to me about the horror that is Photoshop's "lens blur"

filter...)

Give me a 4x5 CCD for less than the price of my first house, and I'll never shoot film

again...

Well, in the case of th 24 1.4L, it's in fact 2 full stops faster than it's closest equivilent. If

you need those stops, you need 'em, but I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the

difference between it and the 2.8 stopped down to f8 or so.

Me, I like low-light, no flash photography, and I like being able to get some background

blur while still having enough of a wide angle (on my 1.6 DSLR) to show most of the

people in a room. So, you can have my 24 1.4L when you pry it from my cold, dead

fingers...

Apropos of this discussion, from the NY Times obit of Richard Avedon yesterday:

Mr. Avedon was capable of being profound and succinct in both pictures and words. His

definition of a portrait is a model of concision: "A photographic portrait is a picture of

someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is

as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks."

I think it's for sort of the same reason you see so many shots in magazines these days

ostentatiously include the film border around the image (which in many cases are shot

digitally, with the border added by Photoshop afterwards. Sometimes they don't even

make sense - I've seen some color shots that had labels for B&W emulsions, and vice

versa)

In Paul Fussell's book "Class", an dissection of the American status system, he noted that

in every era, the upper class adopts more expensive, less convenient "antique" technology

in order to differentiate

themselves from the middle class, which is furiously trying to acquire the latest and

greatest things in order to stay "up to date" and in turn differentiate themselves from the

lower classes, who can't afford the latest toys.

So as film continues its march to obsolescense (please, no DvF flamefests - I am well

aware it is a long way away), the acoutrements of film - including an overly shallow depth

of field that revels in the very thing you went to such lengths to avoid back when you

actually were shooting 4x5 - acquire a mystical significance.

It's one of the reasons I think there will continue to be a demand for fiim-based wedding

shooters, particularly for high-end weddings. Shooting only on film is already starting to

be seen as having more "class"...

I hate to add to the seemingly endless "x vs. y" questions, but I can't seem to find a lot of

info about these lenses on the web. I tried the Canon 24-70 2.8L, but since I really need

the wide end more than anything and I really like available light, I thought I'd return it and

get one of these. I realize the Canon is better - but is it 4x better? I'm particularly

interested in barrel distortion and sharpness wide open (which is where I'll probably be

using it most of the time on my 10D). I've tended to shy away from non-canon glass, but I

keep hearing pretty good things about Sigma, and the price is hard to beat...

That's interesting - I would have assumed that a digital rangefinder would use an

electronic shutter. Are there advantages to mechanical shutters I'm unaware of?

Hell, that's nothing - I'm still trying to figure out why they were referring to "World War I"

in 1939...

Ok, so after reading all these posts and telling myself I needed to get a view camera for a

few years now, I finally picked up an old Graphic View II with a couple of lenses cheap on

ebay.

I practiced focusing for awhile, made a few test exposures on polaroid (a 545 I picked up

from KEH) to make sure I could at least pretend I knew what I was doing, I then took the

crazy step of lugging the whole thing out to visit my father on Nantucket a few weekends

ago. (As my arms started to give out as I made the short walk from the car to the ferry, I

started serious reconsideration...)

I spent an entire day driving around the island, scouting for locations, then drove back to

the most promising just as the sun was beginning to set. I parked in a rather precarious

position by the side of the road, set up the camera by a fence, reconsidered, moved it

again, took a polaroid, determined that portrait would work better, recomposed, moved

the camera again, tilted and focused, tried to remember what I had read about the

Schliempflug (or whatever) principle, and stood waiting for some clouds to move and the

sun to come out. Took 2 quick exposures on Velvia 100F, thought that I'd better try some

Tri-x as well, but the clouds came back and showed no sign of leaving, and the flat light

was really unappealing.

Finally got my transparancies back today. As I looked at them through the loupe, I got the

wieirdest feeling: for the first time, the feeling I had in looking at a scene I wanted to

photograph came through on some level in the actual photograph. It's like I've just been

fooling around all this time, and now I'm really starting to make photographs...<div></div>

Trevor -

I would disagree. The Beauhaus is of a peice with the other artistic and social movements

of the 20th century, a extension of the enlightenment to claim that human rationality

could "start from zero" and remake society from the ground up. Buiolding certainly could

have been designed with "light and air" while still maintaining continuity with accepted

architechural traditions - but the point was to complelty break with those traditions, in an

attempt to remake society on a rational basis.

For a good overview of the effects of this "high modernism", read James Scott's "Seeing like

a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed"

The 50 1.8 was my first lens, and I don't regret it. (I ended up replacing it with a 1.4

after I dropped it - one disadvantage of the plastic) It's really a great lens.

What I would question is going with an EOS7 as a first camera. When i first got into

this maddening hobby I rushed out and got an Elan IIe, with all the modern bells and

whistles. What followed was a long process of turning off the features, one by one,

until at last (years later) I started to understand what making photographs was really

about.

Looking back, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and money by getting a

cheap used mechanical body, a sharp 50mm lens, and concentrating on

photography rather than doodads. The advantage of film over digital is that cheap

cameras with good lenses take photographs that are just as good as the ones from

expensive cameras with good lenses...

I was just doing the same thing last night and found the cable release helped a lot -

by keeping my head level with the camera, I was able to autofocus on my eyes and

snap the shot. Of course, I found I really didn't like the perspective of the 50mm and

switched to the 100mm, and now the camera was too far away, so I had to revert to

the guessing method. One thing that worked pretty well was extending an object (my

hand just reached, using the cable release) to roughly where the focus should be, and

locking on that. The cable release for this camera (which of course uses a different

interface form my Elan IIe) was damn pricey, but sometimes you can't do without it...

I think several of the posts on this thread have hit on it - there are real differences

between how men and women think, and it shows up in their approaches to

photography. In general, men are more "system oriented" - wanting to investigate

"how things work". Thus, we tend to get obsessed with technical minutia, sometimes

to the detriment of what we were trying to do in the first place. Women tend to see

the world more in the context of personal relationships - more concrete social reality,

and less abstract systemetizing. Thus, a women will generally be more concerned

with what she can do with a camera, how she can use it to express whatever she

wants to express, than about it's technical specs.

One thing I notice - I have all this expensive photo equipment, I take tons of pictures

(some of them pretty good), but most of them either stay on my computer or, once

printed, go in a folder somewhere (I always mean to get them mounted and framed,

but I somehow never get around to it...) Thus, my walls tend to be rather bare. It's as

if, once I've acheived the result I was looking for, the actual photograph is irrelevant

to me: onto the next project! But every women I know has every spare square inch of

wallspace covered with (usually poorly made) photographs of her, her friends, her

dog, etc...