Which Camera?
Well the only large format camera I had really heard about being used before my trip to the Hebrides was an Ebony non folder by Joe Cornish. Having looked around the web, this seemed to be the ‘dream camera’ for a lot of people as it combined being a work of art in of itself and still was supremely functional and lightweight. The fact that it could be stored in a backpack with the lens on and I wouldn’t have to play with unfolding standards seemed a large bonus. Up until going on the L&L course (Large format and Light pockets course perhaps?) I was none the wiser and so when I saw the results and process and liked what I saw, I started asking questions. One of the first questions was “So what is this asymmetric back all about and do I want it?” to which the answer was mostly “You don’t need it but it does make certain types of photograph a cinch to set up without having too many downsides”. So this seemed a good thing.
And then David Ward gets his Linhof Technikardan out and starts me thinking “That’s a nice technical camera!”. So I had a quandry, the more utilitarian camera for making photographs was the Linhof (apart from collapsing and opening it) but the beautiful camera was the Ebony. The Linhof had a larger range for telephoto shooting (the standards could extend to accomocate huge focal lengths) but the Ebony suited the wider angles well.
Well I swung back and forth for a bit and I was also influenced by the fact that too many people have got Ebony which, for me at least, makes me not want it (call it the anti-sheep factor). In the end however, the lust for wood and metal and beauty won out. So this was a first choice mostly made.
The second, and more difficult choice in many ways, was the lenses. I not only needed to choose which lenses, but more importantly which focal lengths. The problem I have with selecting focal lengths is that I look at a book like ‘First Light’ by Joe Cornish and find out that 95% of the photographs were taken with a 90mm lens. But they look to me like anywhere between 18mm to 40mm equivalents (35mm equiv, which I will refer to as EFL for equivalent focal length). One of the only really wide shots he has in the book is a 58mm which looks like a 24mm EFL. There is obviously something wierd that the camera movements can introduce into a picture that affect it’s EFL look.
The next post will go into lens choices.
