The Joy of Photography
March 15, 2005 | 05 Safar 1426
There are many joys to being a photographer. Creating. Interacting. Seeing your pre-visuals come to life. I love and live to photograph. There are few things that bring me as much joy or find me in my element as when I’m behind the lens. This particular project has been and is really engaging. For those not in the know, I have embarked on a large-format portraiture project where I am photographing exclusively on a 4×5 or an 8×10 camera. Sadly, many young photographers today have abandoned large-format in favor of the instant gratification of digital. And while I have no bone to pick with digital, hell, I shoot digital, there still is a time and place for these great cameras. If you are unfamiliar with that type of camera I’ll try to explain here. Large-format cameras are a curious animal. They are at once ancient technology in terms of how they operate; a lens mounted on the front. A bellows which allows the light to travel from lens to the film. Sushi Chef
A film back which holds the film holder where sheet film is kept (you shoot one sheet of film at a time with these cameras). The bellows expands and contracts for focusing. Very simple and yet for all its simplicity it is in many ways the most advanced camera there is. You can move the film plane independent from the lens plane. This allows you to “throw the focus around” for lack a better term. In the above photograph of the sushi chef, the plane of focus is diagonal across the image, with only the chef’s head and part of the menu sharp with everything else “going soft”. This is accomplished by those independent movements. The same or very similar can be done on Photoshop but results done in-camera always look better. It’s also the style of how the shooting is done. In the case of the three women above, I showed up to the studio an hour or so before the shoot. Loaded my film holders, set up my lights and got ready to go. When they arrived in the studio the only thing that was needed was to set the focus. After that I was able to step around from the camera and direct/interact with my subjects. With a traditional SLR camera your eye is behind the lens, looking through at that decisive moment except when you trip the shutter, then it blacks out. With large-format you are looking straight at the subject and you can witness that decisive moment, wait for that perfect time to trip the shutter. Ahh…, I love photography. Wanna know more about the photographic process? Shoot me an email.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Photography’s been an on-again-off-again passion for over seven years now. I am not doing much in the way of paying gigs now - instead turning my focus to the American Muslim community. Looking to start a new series of portraits of American Muslims in Philly.
Large format’s the only way to fly in my book. But in reality, it’s a hard format to work with. Film’s getting harder to find. Harder to find places to process 4×5. But if you can work it out, you can produce images, the quality of which cannot be matched, in my opinion, by digital, regardless of megapixels.