Big Ideas, Large Format

Ah! the large format! This assignment was one I was waiting to do since the beginning of the year. I had used a large format camera in the past, my step dad owns a even larger one, a 8x10 I think, and I always wanted to learn more about them and mostly, take more pictures using the technology.

My and my partner for the assignment tried different types of picture. We tried to a city scape and for that we even played with the controls on the side of the cameras to make the "accordeon" part change from a straight angle to a slightly curved one. The results did not really show that the angle had been changed, and the pictures were overexposed so I did not decide to post any of those images.

The ones I am showing here are by far my favorite. In the first image I wanted to show the moving traffic on each side of me while I was standing still. Since it was a bright sunny day , the moving cars did not leave much of a mark on the images, but still, the result is quite nice, if you look carefully you can even see the ghostly prints left by the moving cars. The other picture I have here, "Matte with a stick", really amazed me when I first saw it in the dark room. I had wanted to create a ghost portrait of myself, which is kind of going with a theme I have been digging into in my personal work, and the results are just better than I expected. What I did was quite simple. We took a long exposure with a very small aperture and I left the frame for a third of the exposure time, right in the middle. The results are beyond what I had planned for. I am really happy with it.