You know, one of the most satisfying things for me these days is to spend a day at an interesting location and take six or twelve pictures with a 4x5 large format camera.

It's hard work. It means to carry a heavy-ish bag over your shoulder and a tripod with a big camera attached to its end. It means to thoroughly set up the camera, check the angles, open the shutter, stick your head under a black cloth on a sunny day with temperatures in the 90s. To focus on the focusing screen, you use a loupe that's hanging around your neck. It means to use a hand-held light meter, fish a film cassette out of your bag, load the camera, set the aperture, set the shutter speed, hope that you didn't get any of the steps out of sequence, pull out the dark slide and finally take the shot.

It's error-prone too. It means that there are at least 10 different steps in the process of making one exposure where you can mess up. Accidental double exposure? Been there, have even done a triple exposure once. Forget to set the right aperture after metering? Yep, I have my share of overexposed large format negatives.

If it's that hard work and that error-prone, then why am I doing it? The answer is simple: in the end it's one of the most fun and rewarding experiences that I've had in a long time. Nothing beats creating something with your own hands and finally holding the result of that work in your hands. Or post it online for the world to see. Much more rewarding than any digital shot has ever been.

Over time you get better. Most errors you only do once, as it hurts to lose one out of just a few pictures you'll take that day.

Last weekend I brought my trusty Grafmatic film holder system, a revolver-type 6-shooter that allows you to keep 6 shots in one magazine. Very convenient, but also heavier than normal double cassettes. Which turned into yet another source of error. I accidentally brushed the Grafmatic at the wrong angle with my arm, while the dark slide was still pulled. This resulted in a nice big splash of light pouring onto the exposed negative for a brief time. Long enough to ruin the shot. So I thought.

I ended up actually being quite happy with it. Is it because it's one of my babies? Or is there something about a perfect 4x5 picture seemingly ruined by light leaking onto it?

Let me know what you think.

Here's another picture of the same day. And another one.

I just ran across another blog article that asked the question if mobile phones would take over in the long run and overthrow all other cameras because the sensor technology and the fact that you tend to have one with you all the time.

I'm not so sure for a two main reasons.

1. Control. Cameras tend to get better and better, but even the best automated decisions will not necessarily reflect your intentions.

An example: think about a backlit portrait. Without built-in intelligence, the camera's light meter will tell the camera that there's a lot of light and the image that comes out is likely to be a silhouette of a person. Most cameras nowadays will detect this and compensate for it, resulting in a well-exposed person (and most likely a slightly overexposed background). I guess in most cases that's what the person behind the camera wanted anyway, so it's okay.

But how about the times when a photographer intended to produce the silhouette picture but didn't have a way to tell the camera that that's what they wanted?

The way the current mobile phone cameras look, it's very hard for me to believe that they will get to this level of control any time soon.

2. Sensor size. Different sensor sizes result in different depths of field (DOF) and control over DOF is a very important tool for most photographers.

In-focus and out-of-focus areas in a picture are one out of a whole array of essential tools for photographers when it comes to telling a story in a picture. Focus will show or hide things, focus will help you guide the viewer's eyes through a picture.

Smaller sensors make it very hard to control DOF. Everything tends to be in focus. Bigger sensors make it easier to control DOF. A photographer can place focus where it's important. And as things look right now, mobile phone cameras are pretty unlikely to get larger camera sensors.

Even if mobile phone cameras got larger sensors, that would mean that the lenses needed to be bigger and further away from the sensors, adding bulk and size. Very unlikely.

Will newer technologies and computational photography replace the need for bigger sensors in the future?

Who knows, but at this point in time, even the Raytrix and Lytro cameras cannot do their job without a certain level of bulk, and the results are by far not where they'd need to be.

What do you think? Are we going to see DSLRs disappear any time soon?

Group shot, Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith

Large format photography has the potential to seriously mess with ones mind. The photographer's mind and that of the audience.

For a photographer it is still the most affordable way to get spectacular resolution. The camera movements allow for compositional freedom beyond anything that is possible in smaller formats. Due to their simpler and much more symmetrical design, the image quality of the lenses is generally superb. And last but not least, the different workflow and the more thorough approach to each individual photograph generally make for more thought-out pictures.

The audience reaction to large format pictures is often a different one than to 35mm photography. Due to the higher resolution, the pictures will typically have more detail, which oddly enough tends to be true even when downsized to web resolutions. The large size of the medium (4x5" and higher) results in a very different look and depth of field. And the typical lack of falling lines tends to give even very busy pictures an amount of structure and a tidy appearance that is hard to achieve with smaller formats.

My typical reaction to the higher resolutions used to be: "meh". My impression was that at the sizes typically used on the web, it wouldn't make any difference if the picture was shot with a DSLR or if it was taken with a large format camera.

After having immersed myself in large format photography for a while now, I had to change my previous "meh" into a "HOWLY COW" though. The amount of perceived detail even at smaller resolutions tends to be spectacular.

I should have known about the detail thing from the video side of things though. A very similar effect happens when you downsize HD video footage (1920 x 1080) to SD resolution (544 × 480). The amount of perceived detail is just a lot higher than with native SD footage.

Here's my audio engineer's look at it: sound recordings are often made at a much higher bit-depth (24 bits) and higher resolution (96 kHz) than the resulting CD will ever have (16 bits / 44.1 kHz). Why? Higher perceived resolution, even at the final down-sampled stage.

My next step is to print one of these pictures at 25x50" to see the ACTUAL detail. Zooming in to tiny portions of an image to see them at a 100% pixel resolution on your screen just isn't the same.

By the way, here's a little detail from the above shot:

Group Shot (detail), Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith

What's the largest print you've ever made?

Car Train (click to view and comment on flickr)

Man muss analoge Bilder auf die Schatten belichten, die Lichter finden sich dann schon von alleine. Solches hört man immer wieder, und es ist schon ein Stück weit berechtig, speziell wenn man sich im Bereich der "guten" und "normalen" Belichtung befindet.

Two guys with large format cameras in the black forest. Imagine the amount of geeking .. and eye-rolling from non-geeks ;)

Black Forest (click to view and comment on flickr)

Here's the first official test of the homebrew International Pinhole, complete with proper exposure times (I hope), taking reciprocity into account, even including me freezing off my fingers, as a tough photographer should do (the other choice would be to throw myself on the ground, but that was even colder).

» see how this camera was made

Some background info: aperture of the pinhole is f/200, focal length of the camera is 60mm, it accepts international (graflok) backs, which includes 4x5" film cassettes, Polaroid backs, roll film backs and more. To be installed: mechanism to hold the backs in place, soon to come.

Next up: develop and scan the pics. And post if they're any good..