Composite from collected images tagged with “half dome” on Flickr.

Chamonix 45N-1

I’ve been shooting exclusively with a large format camera for about a year now. There have been many times in the last twelve months when I’ve seriously questioned that decision. My previous 4×5 camera was heavy, wobbly, and didn’t like to stay in focus for very long. I got so tired of carrying that thing out for a whole day only to come home with a sore neck and a stack of out of focus negatives.

At the same time, I knew that I was doing the right thing by sticking with large format. I am in love with the 4×5 negative and the way the view camera works, and that feeling has only grown—even when I haven’t always been happy with the results.

I decided a few months ago that it was time for a new camera and started doing some research. My goal was to find a camera that stays out of the way; the fewer little operational problems I have to worry about the more I can concentrate on making pictures. I decided on the Chamonix 45N-1, which is becoming known as the sports car of the large format photography world: well-made, lightweight, and extremely stiff. It’s also nice to look at and reasonably priced, as far as these things go. It’s too soon to tell if I’m going to fall in love with this camera, but so far I’m very impressed.

Please permit me a quick digression into the world of websites, which is, after all, what I do to support my photography habit. Having a portfolio website is important for photographers. Even if you’re not a professional photographer and can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on the latest and greatest in modern web technology, you need something more than a Flickr account or a blog to point people to when they ask to see your work.

You could easily set up an account with LiveBooks or PhotoShelter, or hire a designer if you’ve got the money or aren’t technically inclined. Many people opt to build their own websites, however, whether it’s from scratch or with the help of a web content management system. One very popular web CMS is called WordPress; it’s the software I use to run this site and many of the sites I’ve built for photographer friends over the years. I’ve created a WordPress theme that has everything you need to put together a basic portfolio website in about 10 minutes:

WordPress is customized through template files that control the way your website looks. What I have found is that there are plenty of portfolio themes out there already, but they’re all way too flashy for my taste. I’ve found it hard in the past to recommend WordPress to photographer friends because I knew that it was going to take a lot of work to create a site that is clean, attractive, and easy to use.

The goal in building this theme was to create a solid jumping off point; you can use it as-is or customize it to your liking. It’s as basic as you can get: a homepage slideshow, easy-to-create project pages, and additional pages to provide whatever extra information you need. It’s got a built-in blogging system, of course. It’s easy to install and update, and not too hard to customize if you know a little bit of HTML and CSS.

So feel free to give it a spin. I’d love to know what you think!

This goes on the list of weirder things I’ve done, but here it is anyway: an off-road wheelie backpack. Anyone who’s ever tried to lug a large format camera around for any amount of time knows about exhaustion and back pain. Over the years, I’ve been through a string of ever more complicated and expensive camera backpacks, trying to find one that wasn’t terrible. They all are. Earlier this year, I switched to an inexpensive frame backpack, which is more comfortable than any camera backpack I’ve ever tried.

Even a pack like this starts to feel very heavy after a couple of hours, though, so I decided that I needed a little extra help. I bought a jogging stroller on Craigslist and cannibalized the rear axle and wheels for this beast, which I have dubbed the Mastodon. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it stands about four feet tall, and it’s surprisingly light. It’s a little top-heavy with the tripod hitched to the side like that, and it still needs some sort of kickstand so it can stand up by itself, but for a prototype I think it’s a pretty good start.

Photograph of Alec Soth, photographer unknown

I got a crazy good deal on a tripod that is about 7 feet tall. I attached my camera and extended it all the way up and realized that it’s more than a foot over my head. So I got myself one of these.

I have learned about large format photography through books and the web, but mostly through trial-and-error. Is this something everyone else already knows? Obviously our friend Mr. Soth has a clue.

I have written previously about photographs made at the sites of famous paintings, and about using Google Maps to investigate and record the locations of well-known photographs. A similar mash-up of art and technology has been developed by the Tate and Google, which demonstrates just how much the British landscape has changed since the time of Turner and Constable.

This article in the Guardian tells the story, or you could just skip straight to the slideshow. Seeing one of Constable’s pastoral images followed by the contemporary view is jarring, to say the least.

That moment of recognition reminded me very much of the feeling I got when I first saw these two photographs from Frank Gohlke’s Aftermath series.

Aftermath: The Wichita Falls, Texas, Tornado No. 10A and 10B - Maplewood Avenue, near Sikes Senter Mall, looking east, 1979/1980. Photography by Frank Gohlke

Within the context of the entire Aftermath series, these two images have an even stronger impact. Gohlke’s recent book Accomodating Nature features several photos from this series, and is very much worth a visit to the library.

If you’re bored of thinking of time on a scale of years and centuries, how about moving to a geological scale, as in Jem Southam’s Rockfalls of Normandy?

Vaucottes, November 2005, Vaucottes, February 2006, by Jem Southam

OK, that last pair are only a few months apart, but you get my drift.

Many thanks to Dr. Steven Zucker from the wonderful smarthistory.org for the heads up on the Guardian article.

I broke down and bought a Nikon Coolscan 9000 today. For two reasons: I found a small crack in the glass of my Epson 4990 yesterday, and also because I am very excited about my photos from Sicily and want to be able to print them larger than 12×12. I’ve never been satisfied with the print quality of medium format scans on the Epson beyond 12×12. I think I may have gotten the only 9000 in New York City, since Calumet is the only shop that had it in stock, and they had exactly one.

I’ve had the scanner just long enough to realize that the software isn’t 100% compatible with OS X 10.5 or Photoshop CS3, that I am going to need to upgrade to the glass negative carrier (or maybe save $300 and do the DIY version like this guy did?) and to realize just how big and loud the thing is. From the one or two scans I’ve managed to make so far I can already tell that I don’t like the software at all, but the final scans seem quite a bit sharper than the Epson at 1800 dpi. More reports as they come in.

UPDATE: Just for comparison’s sake, here’s the same negative scanned with the Nikon Coolscan 9000 and the Epson 4900 at 2400 DPI. (Click the image to see the 100% view) Both were scanned as raw tiff files in VueScan and inverted in Photoshop with ColorNeg. The complete photo can be seen here.

Thanks for your interest in my “Taking a Picture” series. Just as a note, I have continued improving my digital workflow and some of these notes are now out-of-date. Feel free to drop a line in the comments or contact me directly if you would like more information on my photographic workflow.

I’ve been planning to sit down and write this for quite a while, but I’ve been keeping very busy with other things. The fact that it is currently hailing outside has given me the chance to spend some quality time indoors, though. Much like my previous post on scanning, I am going to try to avoid going into excruciating detail on every step of my digital printing workflow, because I don’t think it will be worth reading for most people. The general ideas are more important, and I am glad to answer any specific questions in the comments or offline. That’s not to say this won’t be a very technical post, and a long one at that. Please remember that I am giving this final print away to someone who has commented on one of the posts in the series, so feel free to drop a line even if it’s just to say hello.

Black and white inkjet printing felt like a very daunting subject when I first approached it. Two years ago, I had a low-end HP inkjet printer which made acceptable 8×10 color prints, but was absolutely lousy for black and white. It was impossible to get profiles for non-HP papers, and there was practically no information about archival permanence for the paper and inks I was using. In short, I wanted to create black and white prints on matte paper that looked as good as or better than what I could produce in the darkroom, and I wanted them to last a very long time. So I took the plunge into the deep waters of selecting a printer and building a solid black and white digital printing workflow.
Read the rest of this entry»

I will be posting some in-depth details on my current scanning process when the “taking a picture” series continues, but some posts about scanning I’ve come across recently are worth pointing out.

I purchased a refurbished Epson 4990 flatbed sacnner about a year ago, knowing that it was only an interim solution until I could justify the cost of a dedicated film scanner. I deliberately stayed away from the top-of-the-line V750 flatbed, knowing that I would want to replace it in a year or two anyway. I have been able to coax a lot of performance out of the Epson, using VueScan and specialized holders from betterscanning.com; sometimes even going as far as to wet-mount my negatives for maximum fidelity. The 4990 was always a compromise, though, and I have come up against the limits of the scanner again and again. At some point in the future, I would like to be able to make larger prints than I am currently able, 16×16 or even bigger, without having to send my film out to be scanned. And so, I’ve been collecting information about the Nikon CoolScan 9000, which is probably the best film scanner most amateurs can expect to own.

• Michael Dominic, of weaved.net, posted some information about wet-scanning with the CoolScan 9000, using a modified glass carrier. Looking at the 100% crops, the wet-scans at 4000 dpi have me drooling. I have a wet mount carrier for the 4990, but the highest optical dpi is somewhere around 2000, and even then, those pixels are not nearly as sharp as a scan from the CoolScan. This isn’t just overly-enthusiastic pixel peeping—the real world difference between the two scanners means that I can currently print at a maximum of 12×12 at a quality I am happy with. Scans from a CoolScan 9000, on the other hand, can be printed at 24×24 and beyond, given a good enough original negative.
• Colin at Photostream wrote about “The disappearing scanner”, mentioning that the CoolScan 9000 is getting harder and harder to find in stock anywhere, and is likely not in production any more. The number of options remaining for those who need to scan medium format film are dwindling.

This is bad news for medium format fans like myself. I am coming to the party quite late, but I have the enthusiasm of the newly converted. I am happy to be shooting medium format black and white film for the forseeable future, but the supplies and equipment are going to get harder and harder to find. With the decline in film usage, it’s obvious that R&D for film scanners has been put on the back burner and we can expect no new, significant improvements any time soon. I get the feeling that the CoolScan 9000 represented a golden age in the medium format digital darkroom, and that time may be quickly passing.