Shooting Large Format Analog: Better Than Digital

The most important image to me in travel has always been the landscape or cityscape, and so, I have been able to use the same system for the last twelve years – a large format field camera, two lenses, and Quickload film. I know that as we move deeper and deeper into the digital world, this seems odder and odder, and seen more as a type of contrarianism or neoludditism. But that is not the case. I appreciate the benefits of digital photography as much as the next guy. Two benefits of digital appeal to me particularly; the wonders of RAW and the ability to rapidly and effortlessly keep the finger trigger happy. These days, I shoot wildlife and people with a digital camera. More particularly, I use digital for macros, telephotos and fisheye images.

I photographed a few weeks ago in the Moab area, which collects photographers like a well collects frogs. There, nearly every photographer I met along the way happened to know about me. “Oh, you met the couple from Williamsburg yesterday didn’t you?” The story is that I was a conversation piece. There is actually a guy with a large format camera walking around Canyonlands National Park! Photographers are funny that way. They are so often gearheads, always referring to other photographers by their equipment. Equipment is secondary to me. For me, photography is about creating time to be outdoors and in the field.

Large format photography has benefits that, in this modern world of ours, far outweigh digital systems in my view. A few weeks ago, I had some high-quality drum scans made of my 4x5s. Each file was 250 Megabytes. Seeing the results of these drum scans is to see a level of detail and clarity that is simply missing in digital photography. Some believe it will be 20 years before digital can affordably match large format film. Since the stock of Quickload films is now exhausted, and my options for large format photography are falling apart, I hope that’s not the case. While I display my images mostly in 72 dpi on my travel photography blog, each one of those images contains another story – a fine-grained story that I hope to display in print some day.

But large format has a few other benefits. Tilt is one. Large format cameras have adjustable and tiltable fronts and backs, so that you can adjust perspective or even create depth of field advantages. These depth of field advantages are particularly important to me, since I often shoot in very low light, but need to keep the entire image in focus.

The next benefit is that the large format camera is almost entirely mechanical. No batteries or electronics. I photograph in areas where the sand whips up in my face, or it may be very cold, or very hot, or even raining. All of these situations favor a simple camera. I have never had to repair my large format camera, and it has never failed me in the field. While large format film is expensive, I actually consider my large format system, which I purchased while just out of college on a nominal budget, to be less expensive than digital, by far. I have managed to maintain a simple system for 12 years. The equivalent in digital cameras over the same time period would have reached into the tens of thousands. When I asked B&H Photo and Video about the possibilities of converting my system to digital, the salesman admitted that the system I am using now is pretty much state of the art, and there is no better route to creating the kind of landscape images I want to create.

Lastly, there is something special about having your image displayed upside down, in a way that makes it impossible to see the image as anything but a pure composition. This process, of putting a black cloth over your head and contemplating an image that will cost five dollars per image, is the opposite of the habits that digital imposes – multiple shots to nail the right shot. The rapid fire mentality of digital is also instructive, because it allows us to experiment in ways we could never experiment before. But large format’s lesson, which forces us to consider exposure and composition carefully, forces us to think about photography in a much different way, and to find our answers about exposure and composition in a much more constructed way. I like the lessons I learn from using both formats.

For more of Erik’s great photography and travel writing, visit his website: Notes From The Road