Large Format, Ritual, and Results

Every once in a while, I'll read something which seems to make a bunch of random thoughts I've been having for quite a while crystallize into a more coherent form. Last week I got such a comment in email from Ed Richards, who wrote

I would also think about whether the ritual of LF is necessary, whether the instant gratification but ultimately limited capabilities of digital are helping undermine your sense of photographic worth. Maybe what you need is a bigger camera.:-)

I think Ed is wrong (I don't think I need a bigger camera), but I do think he's on the right track. That is, I think the size camera you need depends to a large part on whether you've ever USED a bigger camera.

When I returned to photography after a long hiatus, I went out and bought a 35mm SLR. After a bit, I concluded that the 35mm SLR was inadequate for the sort of photography I wanted to do. This conclusion was wrong; it wasn't so much that I needed a different camera as I needed much better technique and a different frame of mind. But I bought a 4x5 view camera, and then a much nicer 4x5 view camera, and I photographed for a long time exclusively in large format. I thought that the important changes were that I was now getting big, sharp, grainless prints with ease, but the hidden win was that as result of switching to a large, slow, ponderous camera, I finally slowed down enough to pay attention to technical matters and practical technique, and as a result of this slowing down, I started paying more attention, and my results improved.

So, despite switching to large format for what in retrospect seems like the wrong reasons, it turned out to be the right decision to move things along (for me, not necessarily for someone else).

The big factor, which Ed alludes to rather directly, is that the ritual of working in large format makes a difference in your mental state as you work. Working quickly with large format takes a fair amount of discipline, which mostly emerges as a fairly set routine to making an exposure - camera setup, compose, focus, meter, close the shutter, set the aperture and shutter speed, cock the shutter, load the film holder and pull the darkslide, release the shutter, etc. As a result of this relatively lengthy ritual, and the physical size of the resulting negative, you end up feeling like after you've made an exposure, you've actually accomplished something of significance. And if that's the case, you're mentally prepped to feel that the results must be important, too. (It turns out this is wrong, but from a mental state point of view, the wrongness doesn't matter much).

When you work with a digital SLR, there's very little ritual, and the results are a digital file on a computer - a result which is intangible compared to a 4x5 negative. So it would be easy to feel like nothing significant was accomplished when you let the shutter go.

And yet, strangely, when I take the 5d out into the field, and make an exposure, I do feel that sense of accomplishment. I think that after working with 4x5, enough of the cues that make me feel like I've done something remain - cues like carefully selecting the camera position before setting up the tripod and camera. So the result is that if I'd never used a large format camera for a long period, it might be the case that I'd need to use one just to get that feeling of significance. But, as it turns out, I have used a large format camera, and I no longer seem to need the big camera to tell me that I'm doing something worthwhile.

So I end up going out with the 5d and making a large number of exposures, and then I come back to the workroom and I download them, and look at them on the big monitor, and I feel that same sense of satisfaction I felt with large format.

But I wonder if that would be the case if I'd never worked with large format at all. Perhaps the big advantage of working in large format is that it makes subtle but important changes in your working method - changes that don't go away just because you stop using a large format camera.