People curious about the big Pacemaker Speed Graphic I was lugging around on Saturday and Sunday at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival sometimes stopped and asked me about the images that battered old box put out and said that it must put out something beautiful. I agree but I also said that it depended on the photographer who is still very new at 4x5. Currently, with the very low number of 4x5 sheets that I expose I think I'm about 25% hit ratio which I think is the same for any format I am shooting, only I take an extremely low amount of shots in the same time that I would with digital or 35mm.

The portrait I took above took me about five minutes to set up with my tripod, meter with my Sekonic L-508, compose, meter again and take. If I had had more sheets with me I might have taken two shots for safety, but I only loaded four the entire festival and shot some instant also. (If this is you in the portrait, forgive me but I don't know where I put your business card).

Flare with large format

One of the issues I've come to understand after this session is the need to shade my lens from flare on a 4x5-mounted lens. On this picture you can see there was a lot of flare on it that I had to eliminate by bringing the red saturation down a lot: which then washes out the image unfortunately.

On SLRs flare is no big deal since your lens hoods are cheap. The question then comes up why not get a hood for a large format. They exist and they are expensive. The reason being that large format lenses are perched at the end of bellows that can be adjusted with rise and fall (and rotated) and twisted and with every bend a shade must bend with it and has a risk of vignetting.

Think about your static barrel SLR lens and imagine being able to twist it like a pretzel. You can do that with some 4x5 and 8x10 systems. Vignetting would be a huge problem if you couldn't pinch that hood out of the way. Any hood for a large format system has to be adjustable. Many of them (compendium shades) resemble the accordion-like bellows so you can adjust them to match the flow of the bellows preceding the lens. In practice, many large format photographers shade with a card, the dark slide or even a hat rather than take yet another piece of equipment with them (and one that requires more adjustment). Static hoods exist for landscape-oriented lenses but with landscape your movements won't be as extreme as with medium or portrait lenses.

An associated issue is that the view through the back of the camera might not show the flare as your view itself is shaded (or even improperly shaded). I am only now reading up about it since I have seen the consequences of it.

4x5 Fuji Instant

One solution is to take an instant shot to see general lighting conditions as I did here. Unfortunately - for reasons I don't know - my negative shot is very much flared. I didn't even bother scanning it as I could see from the negative that it was useless. As an instant shot, the Fuji (PA-45) is okay. I don't much like the tones of Fuji as scanned and have to adjust them to be acceptable. The Fuji as a print in itself looks pretty nice but you would have to have it in your hand to see what I mean.

This is one of my moment shots that I like more for the memory than for the shot itself. Stage two was under a canopy of trees and was just a very nice place to be while listening to music. It was cool, many people like these two ladies, just lay at the feet of trees and enjoyed conversation and sounds.

Earlier on I had a very nice conversation with an older photographer from San Francisco who spoke about his large format photography in another age. We talked about how contemplative it was as a discipline. It can be very zen since it is so slow. I took this photo of them standing about eight feet away and they never once looked up to see that I had set up with tripod and release, checking exposure on them. Unlike SLRs and medium format, there isn't a lot of noise when you take the shot. I've even double-exposed more than once because I didn't hear the shutter and thought I had mis-fired. This time, though, the exposure is perfect. It was my last shot and then I could go home.