Photographing Buildings.

[Keith Tapscott]

What functions do you consider important when choosing a view-camera if you want to photograph buildings and gardens? The choice of lenses as well.
I mainly want to discuss the use of the 4x5 format as being the most practical option.

[dennis]

Keith,
I have found the Rodenstock 55mm & 90mm lenses very good + a 150mm which is useful. The 55 just covers 5x4 with a little movement possible (Toyo 45AII) although I used it mostly with a 6x12 RFB. Dennis

[Emmanuel Bigler]

Hello from France !

For buildings, depends whether you obey traditional rules regarding strictly non-converging verticals, or not

If you aim at a classical view, like pictures of the old Paris by Eugène Atget (a unique Atget exhibition is on-going at musée Carnavalet in Paris from April 25 to July 29, 2012) the few features you need are a serious tripod head allowing you to set the camera with a perfectly horizontal optical axis, and a front rise.

Lateral shifts might be useful if you want to avoid some disturbing objects in the foreground. I've actually never used this possibility, but it is demonstrated in most classical tutorials on how to properly use the movements of a view camera.

Atget's images often show a black circle on top, this is because the old French master did not have modern lenses like us, with a generous image circle. Atget probably preferred to have his images cropped by the limits of the image circle than letting the verticals be convergent.

Summary : in this approach of classical architecture shots, you do not need any tilts, only a generous amount of rise and lenses that can cover for this amount of rise. A centre-filter might be useful, consider this extreme example of a vertical 6x12 shot with a solid amont of front rise, where even the centre filter cannot compensate for light losses in the top corners of the image (lens in use here : a Grandagon-N 6.8-75mm) I had used here a small amount of front tilt, the top of the tree is not sharp, but after re-considering the situation, I'm not sure that this tilt was absolutely necessary.
This other example, pushed in 6x12-vertical on purpose beyond what would be reasonable, no tilts at all, just to see what happens with the 55mm Apo Grandagon, was not shot with any centre filter, darkening in the corners inside the church looks "acceptable".

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For gardens, things are probably different. If you do not have any buildings in the background, if you do not have any rectangular objects for which you need to obey the old rule of verticals being kept parallel in the image, in fact you have a great deal of freedom not to use any movement. If the garden is a classical garden surrounded by classical buildings, the good ol rules rules will probably apply to the whole image, so you'll moslty need front rise. In classical French gardens you may have block-shaped trees martyrised by the gardener in order to fit them exactly into cartesian coordinates (X, Y, Z). In this case, even with no buildings, you need to obey the traditional rules of architecture images. Other French gardens like Villandry (Loire valley), or some parts of Versailles gardens, on the contrary, seem to have banned any straight line in the arrangement of hegdes ! But the buildings, in the background, will actually command the proper perspective rendition, at least to a conservative view camera amateur photographer (like me).
This of course should not apply to the traditional British garden, where the freedom of nature is supposed to be respected, hence no rectangular trees should be found, only natural trees and proud to be natural and un-tamed; the arrangement of British gardens being, in principle, to the best of my knowledge, based on rules exactly opposed to the French style However I've never noticed that any British castle exhibits walls "slanted inward" or "outward"

However some amount of tront tilt like in any landscape picture taken with a view camera can be useful for a garden, if the subject in its whole can be included inside a wedge-shaped Scheimpflug portion of space. For "Tunnel-like" images, scheimpflug is useless and you'll have to play with small apertures and dangerous diffraction effects

[dennis]

Keith,
Have a look at my flikr pics on <http://www.flickr.com/photos/toyosnapper/> to see what the lenses are capable of for buildings & some other things. Dennis.

[Keith Tapscott]

Thanks dennis and Emmanuel. It is the perspective controls I mainly wanted to discuss for photographing buildings and which cameras you would choose if starting again from scratch such as monorails or cameras of the Linhof Technika type. The choice of lenses is also important to obtain adequate coverage of the film. This is mainly for the 4x5 format than fitting 120 RFH's.

Most here do photography only as a hobby for their own pleasure, but I haven't found any discussions about how professional large-format photographers go about photographing specific subjects like buildings, interiors, gardens or photographing products in a photographic studio.

[Keith Tapscott]

There doesn't seem to be many books on the subject where view-cameras are used. Most of them are about using digital cameras and software.

This book looks interesting as it was published back in 1962 way before I was born.

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/P ... edir_esc=y

[Charles Twist]

Hello Keith,
I am not sure how many folk still use LF professionally when there are so many digital alternatives. OK they're expensive, but you've got to look the part, right? Anyway, I have used LF for commissions and architecture is the main chance I get (although I am developing the portraiture side).

In terms of lenses, for commissions, I have been asked to shoot steel & glass buildings in a contemporary style and pubs in an olde worlde Victorian style. The lenses for the former are the usual lot of large image circles and low distortion, from 75mm to 210mm. I have a 420mm to compete with SLR's at capturing detail but have never had to use it. For some reason, the image circle naturally tends be just a little longer than the focal length; so a 210mm lens will cover 220mm ish. On 5x4, most lenses above 210mm will give you loads of image circle without straining. Below 180mm, you're looking for high-performance lenses. If you look for lenses that cover 5x7 or even 10x8, you'll find plenty of candidates at all focal lengths, all of which will have been discussed often on the various fora. For the old style, there are all manners of Petzval, Rapid Rectilinear and other more recent designs. I am guessing this is not your main interest, so I'll leave it at that.

I have used a Linhof Technikardan which I ultimately found too compromising, so I now have a Sinar F2, with which I am very pleased. Contrary to what has been stated, I find lateral shift useful. This picture was taken on a 210mm apo Symmar with about 10cm of lateral shift. I think it's worked out . Basically, for movements, you need to think in terms of angles: so a shorter focal length will need less offset than a longer one for the same effect. Even with a 90mm lens, I have dialled in as much as 4 or 5 cm of lateral shift to preserve the horizontals, for example:


(that's an early attempt and I wish I knew under-exposed Velvia 100 has a nasty magenta cast)

And a less dramatic example:



The first 2 shots above used a ND grad to counter light fall-off, but I recommend a centre filter.
Allow for lots of movements if you want to preserve orthogonality with long focal lengths. And with shorter focal lengths, get some bag bellows.

Does that help? Any questions, just fire away.

Best regards,
Charles

[dennis]

Keith,
I wrote the bit below before reading Charles offering, which I agree with.
If it is primarily buildings you want to photograph I think I would go for one of the lighter 4x5 monorail cameras such as Sinar F1 & its later variants, all much the same except (I believe) for the plastics in the later versions. That said I suspect that even field cameras can exceed lens limitations with some movements. The Steve Simmons book, recent ed in pb, is very good, & does deal with architecture, both external & internal, with examples. At least my 1st ed does & I imagine later eds are much the same. Dennis.

[Charles Twist]

Sinar's F and P (don't know about Norma) have just one problem: the spirit level is on the foot of the standard, below the hinge and not on the actual standard. Here's an example of what goes wrong: let's say you start off with the rear standard horizontal on both the X and Y axes; you then tilt it up or down; when you then apply swing, the standard is no longer horizontal. You can alter the tripod head setting to counter this movement, but you have no means of gauging when you're horizontal again. Given the excellent quality of everything else, this one oversight is just extraordinary.

Or am I missing a trick?
Charles

[Emmanuel Bigler]

Contrary to what has been stated,

I stand corrected Where would be the pleasure to chat on the forum, if there was always a consensus
But I'm ready to make progresses and I have no excuse since I own a camera with very precise lateral shifts.
I confess: it is a real shame not to use them.
(I suspect Charles to have bought a precise Swiss-made view camera only for the distinctive pleasure of generous & micrometric lateral shifts )

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Regarding books on understanding & using the view camera + various LF techniques, I own those books (except Stone's nd Simmons'), definitely more recent than 1962, except the Linhof book (1-st ed. 1958), and I warmly recommend them to our readers.
Well, so far I do not have any _British_ book, but it you have British LF references to pass, whichever publication date, being an uncompromising euro-patriot, I would be delighted to read a good British textbook. After all, didn't France & Britain actually invent almost everything in photography

1/ in English:
The most complete _technical_ book is probably Stroebel's
Leslie D. Stroebel, ``View Camera Technique'', 7-th Ed.,
ISBN 0240803450, (Focal Press, 1999)

There is (was, probably out of print) a series of book by the Sinar view camera manufacturer named "creative large format".
Basics and Applications (Creative Large Format Photography)
Sinar Publications AG ISBN-10: 3723100309

A small but very complete technical book by Kodak
The Large-Format Photography (Kodak Publication, No. O-18e.)
by Eastman Kodak Company, James A. McDonald, Roger Vail
Silver Pixel Press; 2nd edition (March 1996) ISBN-10: 0879857714

I love Kodak technical books. Simple to understand, precise, efficient, a model in terms of serious tutorials.
Too bad that Big Yellow ... (OK, I stop lamenting).

Harvey Shaman, The View Camera: Operations and Techniques, Amphoto
Books, 2nd Revised edition edition (Feb 1992), ISBN 0817463755
(this books describes in detail the effects of perspective rendition vs. camera movements)

Users Guide To the View Camera 2ND Edition, Jim Stone Prentice Hall; 3 edition 2003 ISBN 0130981168

There is a Linhof LF tutorial book, I have the French version,
Pratique du grand format - Linhof 1973 - Ed. Nikolaus Karpf - GrossBild-Technik - Munich
but do I not have the exact refernce in english, however this books did exist:
Linhof Practice. An Introduction of Linhof Cameras, Their Accessories, and Photographic Technique.

2/ in French, hard to find but higly recommended by the francophone LF community:

Pierre Groulx, Photographie en grand format (taking pictures and using the view camera, contains excellent examples of buildings in the old Montreal city, )
Modulo Québec, 2001) ISBN-10 : 2891135059

Michel Hébert, Le système des zones et la sensitométrie (exposure and zone-system techniques)
Modulo (Québec, 2001) ISBN-10 : 2891137035

This excellent pair of books are derived from the professional training of young photographers at CEGEP de Matane, a professional school in Québec. In France I doubt that any LF tutorial / professional teaching book on LF photography has been published after 1990, except, may be, translations of Sinar books.
Québec was probably the last part of the francophone world where professionals continued to use and teach LF photography.
Exactly like the Siberian arctic island of Wrangel, where mammoths have quietly survived several millenaries after their continental cousins had dissapeared, killed by cavemen & global warming.

Getting closer to 1962, here is a list of good-old French books of the seventies, very easy & cheap to find as second-hand items.
Eds Paul Montel, a former French publishing company specialised in photography in the XXst century. I think I've already passed those references here, so I apologize for redundancy.
René Bouillot : « Moyens et Grands formats » Paul Montel ~ 1970's
René Bouillot : « Le visage et son image. Le portrait photographique. » Paul Montel, 1977
René Bouillot : « L'objet et son image. Photographie industrielle et publicitaire, » Paul Montel, 1978

3/ in German
Besides the Linhof & Sinar books, published in German, English & other languages, those resources exist on the 'net, free to download:
http://www.foto-net.de/net/kameras/gross.html
http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Photoschul ... 3%9Fformat (oooops !!! like many web references, this one seem to have vanished ...)

[Thingy]

I use the Schneider 58mm XL lens where space is tight (for work photographs) and until recently my Nikon 90mm f4.5 (in Bergen, Norway, which I visit every year or so.). As the perspective is critical, where the lens is pointed upwards (eg Victoria Tower, Westminster) I correct perspective in the usual way, by setting the back level with the building.

[Keith Tapscott]

Thanks to everyone who replied and for posting images and providing links.
My own kit is a Walker-Titan 4x5 XL with a 90mm f/8 Super-Angulon and a 180mm f/5.6 Symmar-S. The camera does most of what I want, but only has some rise/fall and axis lens tilt. No sideways shifts or rear movements.
With hindsight, I should have kept my Sinar-Norma kit which I have now sold. The Titan XL is otherwise a fine camera.

[craigmagee]

I personally use my 4x5 whenever I can whenever photographing buildings. Though admittedly I tend to stick to using the Canon most of the time on commercial jobs.
I have however, been using my Ebony sw45 pretty much exclusively on a project for a major client. You can check it out here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolm ... 954863690/

Kit wise I use - Ebony SW45, Schneider 58mm xl, Nikkor 75mm 4.5, Schneider 110mm xl and Nikkor 180mm.
For me this works perfectly fine. I use the rise/fall a lot and shift occasionally to help with composition.

If I had to buy it all again, the only thing I'd change is probably go for a 150mm instead of the 180mm.