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For the last week I have been leading a workshop teaching people large format photography based here in Glencoe. Although most of the teaching has been about techniques and workflows, we did spend some time discussing what it was about large format that attracts people and keeps them using such cumbersome cameras, even though digital cameras now give almost the same quality final images. After a day photographing in Glen Nevis, we came to the conclusion that one of the big advantages of large format is that very little of your time is actually spent looking at the camera. A typical ‘good’ day with a large format camera may mean just a handful of exposures and hence a great deal of time is ‘invested’ in looking and for each exposure there is the time spent looking at the land and waiting for conditions to be just right. This isn’t unique to large format though. The photographers Orsolya and Erlend Haaberg were asked how many they recharged batteries on their 40 day camping trips in the on the edge of the arctic. They surprised the audience by saying that they only take 5 camera batteries and no way of charging - they just turn on the camera when they have found a photograph and turn it off when they have finished. [ I wrote about a related topic in an article “Opportunity Cost” a few years ago]
Tim Parkin
Issue 147 PDF
Click here to download issue 147 (high quality, 135Mb) Click here to download issue 147 (smaller download, 70Mb) more
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