Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

So the camera and the lens choice were simple (yeah, right) but that isn’t where it all stops. I’ve got to make sure I get all of the other bits that make the camera work of which the following list is a small selection

Tripod Mount
Dark Cloth
Loupe
Quick Load Back
Film
Filter Holders & Filters
Cable Release

The tripod mount had to be an Arca Swiss so I could use it with my RRS BH55 Ball head. After a little research (and a failed bid on ebay for the wrong one) I found that RRS recommend the B22 for the 45SU and I ordered one on ebay two days ago (I also ordered a new L plate for my 5D that has the lug for a wrist strap. I modified my 20D RRS Plate to be able to attach a wrist strap and much preferred that setup over a neck strap).

The Dark Cloth could be anything from an Ebony Special to the T-Shirt. I’ve even heard of people using dracula capes (don’t worry Charlotte). On one forum I found a link to the Black Cloth which is a specialist company (individual?) from America that makes custom dark cloths made out of breathable material that is very dark and setup to allow easy access to the ground glass for focussing. Take a look at Black Jacket from QuietWorks. Keith Walklet from QuietWorks was very helpful over email and gave me two options (after asking what specific camera the jacket was intended for). He also sent a diagram and the following text.

The red and blue paths would work fine with a 32″ neck. They also have the advantage of not requiring the use of the BLACKBAG but face other issues:

Excessive rear tilt may force the neck off the camera back with the red path. With the blue path, you may find that the neck gets in the way of the film holder (if you leave it on during an exposure).

The yellow path, which includes the rear standard, would be best matched with a 40″, but will require you use the BLACKBAG feature to block the light coming between the base and rear cabinet.

So, the 40″ would give you a little more flexibility on how it goes on.

For some additional perspective on the matter, watch this video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8943086050994650067

The video illustrates use with a monorail, but the approach with a larger neck on your camera is similar.

I went for the 32″ to try to keep things neat as I like to keep things as quick as possible to setup. If I’m wrong, I’m happy to spend the money on a second one as Keith has been very helpful and charges a reasonable price for a custom product.

Loupes come in many multipliers from 2x to 10x. I asked David Ward, Joe Cornish and Stuart from Robert White about which they would recommend and all said the 4x although it was mentioned that a 6x could be useful. Robert White recommended the Schneider loupe and also mentioned that the 6x loupe is a better optic that the 4x would be more than good enough if you eyesight was fine.

The Fuji Quickload back seems like a standard choice and I saw one on Ebay that was selling for £100 with a pack of old Velvia and a also a pack of Acros (from the same guy who sold the lens). I had to convince my wife to buy a new fridge to put it all in though (she still thinks it’s for food for some reason).

I have a lee filter set anyway although only in 0.6’s and 0.9’s. I need to get 0.3’s and probably 0.45’s before I go on holiday. David Ward also recommended the 81a, 81b and possibly an 85c depending on new Velvia reciprocity (see David’s blog for a comparison between old and new Velvia).

The final item that I nearly forgot was lens cables, which Robert White recommended the Horseman. I’ll probably order the 50cm one.

So that should be it. I’ll be ordering the Camera, cable, loupe and grads/81s on Friday so we’re close to beginning now

In between the thoughts about lenses and cameras and gear etc. I’ve been building a gallery website for someone I met leading the Light and Land course. I had read David Ward’s photography book before going on the course so thought I knew what to expect. As it was my expectations were confounded and he turned out to be someone with whom I had a lot in common and whose work and thinking matched mine in many respects (including stuff which has no obvious link with photography such as music and reading. I’ll probably contradict this later as I think both of these subjects have strong links with photography).

David showed us some of his work whilst we were away and I was quite literally stunned at the beauty of one of them. The process of seeing this end result was one of the reasons why I came away feeling so strongly about large format, even though the reason I was stunned was more to do with composition than quality. What I was surprised at was that he didn’t have any website that really did his work justice. As I also wish to build my own website, and yet never get around to it, I thought I could combine a few things together to help everybody. I could help David build a website and in the process I would build a framework for a website that I could use myself. As it is I also get the opportunity to bore David with my questions about photography too!

The building of the website raised a few interesting points however. These ranged from the size of images to be used to the positioning and functionality of the next and previous buttons. I’ll talk about a few of these points in future posts but for now I thought I’d mention the issue of the maximum image size to show potential customers.

I have thought about this for quite a while and have found great frustration with many artists websites where their photographs are miniscule. The justification for this is so that people cannot copy or print out the work so that the photographer does not lose money.

I find this a little difficult to understand. The thought that a person who might buy an enlargement of a large format picture would be happy with a postcard size home print is just plain wrong in my opinion. For David’s site, I suggested that the pictures be available with a large dimension of 1200px, This would mean that the largest quality print that someone could make would be approx. 3 inch by 4 inch at 300dpi. They could print a postcard size print off at 6×8 inch at 150 dpi if they wanted. I can’t see that people who might print off a picture such as this on their home printer are going to decide that they now do not need to purchase that 16×20 ilfochrome.

What I can see very clearly is that some people will not buy that 16×20 ilfochrome if all they have to judge it is a 240x320px picture. These are the potential lost sales photographers should be thinking about…

The typical lens grouping for large format is 90, 150 210 with a possible 72 and 300 at either end depending on your preference. Being a stubborn, non-conformist fool, I decided I’d like to work out a completely different grouping for myself. I also wanted to work out my own equivalent focal lengths as the standard multiply by three or four figures seemed odd to me.

So we’ll start with an equivalent focal length for a sample 24mm lens (for 35mm film). In my mind, when I take a photograph on 35mm and then crop to 4×5 ratio, this gives me a foundation for my equivalence. So, with width of my 4×5 cropped 35mm film is 24mm (35mm being 24mmx36mm). The with of a large format film is 4 inches or 4×25.6mm which is 102.4mm. Now this gives me a ratio of 24 to 102.4 as my EFL multiplier which is 4.267 or 0.234 depending on which way you want to work.

So lets look at a few 35mm lenses and see what equivalents we get:-

14 = 60
19 = 81
24 = 102
28 = 119
35 = 149
50 = 213
85 = 363

These seem like sensible equivalents to me. The next step is to work out what spacing of lens sizes I would like. Well I do like the 18-28 region and the standard spacing between 90-150-210 works out as about roughly 40% difference between steps.

Having a look at the lenses available and which lenses have a great reputation, I quickly found that the Rodenstock 150mm Sironar S is universally acclaimed as a large format standard. If we work with this as a starting point and work 40% down, we get to 107mm. This corresponds with a very highly acclaimed Schneider lens, the 110XL Super Symmar. 40% down again and we get 78mm which corresponds with the matching Super Symmar XL of 80mm.

Given these three lenses, I felt they gave a good, wide angle biased lens selection (Albeit at somewhat of a hefty price, at least for the Symmars). The 35mm equivalents for these focal lengths, 80-110-150 are 20mm, 27mm and 37mm which seem to give me a better landscape bias than 90-150-210 equivalents of 22mm, 37mm, 52mm. The bonus of the two Symmars is that they also share the same centre filter size.

At the longer end, I have been recommended the 240 Fujinon A and the 300 Nikkor but in the short term, three lenses is more than enough to worry about.

I messed up these plans a little by finding a very cheap Schneider Symmar S 210 on EBay for 100 pounds which I bought so that when I get the camera I will have at least one lens to test it with. This lens arrived in good condition and seems optically sound.

The main worry I had about the above lens combination were the light falloff of the Symmars in comparison to the Super Angulons (which do clever stuff with pupil size to help with falloff) and also the reputation of the 80mm as being too soft wide open to focus. I have been told that the 80mm softness was a production issue in early lenses and that a new 80mm should not show any difficulty in focusing.

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.

There are a few reasons why I eventually decided that Large Format was probably a direction I would like and each of these arose at a separate point in time. The first time I considered LF was when I was looking at various blogs talking about how digital cameras could almost get a picture that was as good as medium format film. These same articles compared the best digital photos (ignoring scanning backs for the moment) with large format to show how good digital was getting. I remember thinking that the large format pictures just looked so much more real in their portrayal of texture (Charles Cramer 4×5 vs Digital at Luminous Landscape). At the time however, I remember thinking that I really liked that digital gave you a quick feedback cycle and helped to close the loop between taking and learning. However, at that time I was looking into the use of tilt shift lenses and promised myself that when I got my new digital (this was just before I’d bought the 5D) I would get a 24TSE and play with Scheimpflug.

Since that time, I read more Joe Cornish books and found the Ebony website. This lead to much slavering. Unfortunately there was no way I could justify spending that sort of money as I’d only just got my 5D. However, the desire for the engineering that is an Ebony camera stuck with me and I’d quickly look back now and again. This also lead me to find more large format photographers and I remember at one point starting to look into how much it would actually cost to get a LF kit together.

The final straw was seeing the prints produced by David Ward and Richard Childs at the Light and Land course I attended in the Hebrides in Scotland. Combined with seeing the LF cameras in real world use and starting to understand the benefits in composition, I realised this was a path I was inevitably going to travel. So, now I had to explain this to my wife. Fortunately she is long suffering but very understanding and so the green light was given.

At this point I had to decide what Camera and lenses I was going to buy. I’ll leave this for the next post.

Please excuse some of the more hardware oriented posts but other peoples diaries have been very usefull in raising my awareness of what to look for in a product and what products work well and so I return the compliment. This may end up in a ‘history’ article at some point.

When I bought my first camera (Apart from the Zenith E I had when I was 14), I wasn’t particularly savvy about lenses or cameras and so made a few choices based on review sites that weren’t particularly accurate. The Canon 20D was a good choice but out of the Canon 70-300DO, 17-85 and 10-22, only the 10-22 was particularly satisfactory.

The 17-85 was a pain, showing large amounts of chromatic aberration and also very significant sensor bloom (see attached pictures). The CA can be fixed in photoshop but the purply blue sensor bloom added horrible color casts to any fine detail, high contrast areas (tree branches are a good example).

The 70-300 was a great lens most of the time but suffered from low contrast in the details, particularly annoying for grass/plants. It also was very sensitive to veiling flare.

The 10-22 however was great. A beautiful lens that only suffered from a little exessive radial blurring in the corners and a strangle colour cast (the cast was subtle and not noticeable unless compared directly to the results from other lenses).

The final lenses I bought were the 16-35 and the 50 f1.4. The 16-35 was quite good although smudgy in the corners wide open (see 16-9.net for better reviews). The 50 was loveley with a portrait freindly softness at 1.4 and a little at 1.8. An example of both lenses is given in posts with the relevant keywords. I also bought a manfrotto ball head 486RC2 (which I didn’t like, bad QR plate, fiddly and not that strong) and a Velbon sherpa CF631 which I still use. The whole lot went into a mini trekker bag.

A couple of months later I sold the 70-300 and 17-85 and bought a Really Right Stuff BH55 ball head and an Epson R2400 printer. The ballhead, along with an L plate, was fantastic and the printer worked a treat, allowing me to create my own prints on the same day as taking photographs. This setup was used for a year during which time I also got a 70-200 f4 and an RSS Omni Pivot package.

The next big change was when we got some more space in the attic and I replaced my 20D with a 5D which was an amazing change. At the same time I bought a 35 f1.4, 24TSE and a 100 Macro. I also bought a larger printer, some gear to frame pictures and a proper calibrated screen for my computer (what a difference that made).

Most recently, I’ve finally got a camera rucksack that doesn’t wreck my back (Lowepro Pro Trekker II), a laptop that actually works (MacBookPro) and got booked on a Light and Land course in the Hebrides.

As I’ve said, I’ll try not to talk technical too much, just enough to explain why I made the choices I have. I’ll expand a little on some of the items discussed if they are relevant (like how do you carry a large format camera and a 5D in a Pro Trekker bag) but for the most part I’ll try to discuss photography.

Over the last year and a half I’ve been getting more and more engrossed in the subject of photography. I suppose it started before that when I was about 10 and I had a Zenith E for a couple of years but really the interest came about when I bought a Canon 20D with some money I was owed from my company. A week after I bought the camera I went on a holiday in Cornwall and although I didn’t take many great pictures, I took a couple that I really liked and that was the hook. Seeing those photographs printed out with my Epson 2400 was immensely satisfying.

During August of that year, myself and my wife visited various locations around Yorkshire and I took a handful of good shots (particularly of Brimham Rocks and Malham Cove which I’ll post later). Of course, I made a couple of mistakes when I bought the lenses for the camera and sold a few lenses and then sold the camera to get a 5D, which I’ll write about later. I also made loads of compositional mistakes and I’ll pick a few of those out too.

What really motivated me to push photography harder was the total immersive pleasure of being in a beautiful location and trying to portray that feeling through the camera. The process of doing this, whether successful or not, is liberating. It makes you look at things and appreciate things in a way you never would by simply being in a location.

I am now on the edge of another step change over to the “Dark Slide”, as David Ward would put it, and I want to document my thoughts, locations, processes etc so this is a start to that process. I’ll try to post every other day, which may mean I’ll catch up at weekends but we’ll see.

For the first few months, the posts will be mix of my thinking on photography, historical entries to catch up with the present day, hardware discussion (a bit) and also my thoughts as I prepare for the world of Large Format Photography.