The View Camera

Last monday, as I was lugging the recently checked-out 4x5 camera to my car, I started thinking about all the exciting things i could do with it! This semester I am taking an Independent Study Class at UNLV with Professor Catherine Angel. My focus will be Large Format Photography. In brief, I am starting with the 4x5 View Camera, and then switching to the 8x10 later on in the semester.

I don't think I was prepared for how heavy the camera was! for all the ideas and places I want to take it, it will be a challenge. I took a beginning Black and White photo class last summer and really enjoyed shooting film. I have been shooting digital for a few years now and it was a pleasant change to what had become monotonous almost-point and shoot style photography. Don't get me wrong, when I shoot with my digital camera, my photos are thought out and usually pre-visualized before I shoot them. That being said, film and the subsequent prints made from negatives offers an aesthetic unmatched to digital-inkjet prints.

So why they large format? Why even bother with what seems to be a quickly evaporating method of photography? Well, after taking a history photography class I found myself highly interested in the clarity of images which some of the early pioneers in photography had accomplished. Photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, in particular. American made products. I say pioneers, because they indeed pioneered photography as an Art form; and legitimized it as an art medium.

The control of light in their compositions, the tonal values in gray scale, and their creativity all stemming from a light-tight box with a hole. The View Camera is a camera at its most basic form. and as simple a design it is, I say it would take a life-time to master it.

I wanted to go back to that old aesthetic. I wanted to see my photos on silver gel prints, and perhaps to at least come close to what the early pioneers in photography could achieve.

Hopefully this blog will take you on that journey this semester along with me, and in doing so, we can learn a little more about the art of creating images.