Bend me, shape me

Bend me, shape me

Stuff about using a monorail camera… The reason for making a monorail is that it is far more versatile than an ordinary plate camera, where the lens sits on a bed attached to the back. Linking the lens at the front and the plate at the back by a single rail allows both front and rear standards to move freely in every direction. You can move them further apart for extreme closeups or long lenses, you can move them up, down and sideways, as well as tilting them on two axes.

This means that you can achieve wonderful front-to-back sharpness using the Scheimpflug rule (go on, look it up!), and frame a building tightly without converging verticals by moving the front standard and lens upwards, but still parallel to the film.

All of this is a thorough pain in the neck (literally, if the camera isn’t at eye level), but it allows you to do things that are not possible otherwise, other than through things like focus stacking. There are some wonderful examples on the late Roger Hicks’ website: I’ll put a link in a comment later on – for some reason, putting a link of any sort in a blog messes up the way it uploads.

I’ve not done very much of this kind of thing, and I don’t have the sequence of actions for focussing when using tilt or swing internalised (my learning for today is to look it up and read it carefully…)

Of course, a lot of the time you don’t need to use techniques like this, any more than you need to get a tilt/shift lens for your digital camera. It’s just that the physical simplicity and consequent low-tech engineering of large format allows much more ambitious movement, and that’s occasionally useful.

One other thing, although I’ve not exploited it myself… You shoot individual pieces of film, and develop them in small batches (maybe something on that for Silly Sunday?) It’s certainly feasible to develop one piece of film at a time: and that means that if a scene lacks contrast you can give extra time in the developer to build it up. Contrasty scene? Overexpose, and underdevelop. With patience and experience, you can make every frame perfect.

Though if you read either Barry Thornton’s very clear accounts of his pictures, or Ansel Adams’ rather more opaque prose, you will realise that even the masters of the art get things wrong surprisingly often. Thornton’s ‘Elements’ is possibly the single best book on seriously refined darkroom technique in existence, and this is reflected in the price of secondhand copies of the book.