Beta
Polaroids
4x5
Ribbons
Postcards
France
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4x5 Snapshots
These were made with a view camera, a large format camera which in this case produces 4"x5" negatives and involves meticulous focusing and positioning work before the first frame can be photographed. I would find myself in a sweat, and that could just be from setting the tripod up. Throwing the black hood over my head so I could see my subject added an extra layer of perspiration. My goal with this camera was familiarity. I wanted to go from being a digitally focused photographer to using an older method of photography and still be able to produce great results. In the end, I wanted to be able to treat the View Camera like a snapshot camera, making photographs effortlessly and quickly as a scene unfolded.
Many nights were spent in a pitch-black room. In order to develop these negatives, I had to isolate myself in a room over a table of trays filled with various chemicals as I constantly rotated the negatives, one by one, in front of the next, for fourteen minutes straight. Two minutes straight. Eight minutes straight. The lights could then come on, but still rotate the negatives for two minutes, two minutes, ten minutes, two minutes. In the end, I spent nearly an hour on just the development alone for six photographs. At the end of this quarter, I had over two hundred photographs made with the View Camera.
I finished photographing with the View Camera near the end of October. I had contact sheet after contact sheet to look at and see which photographs I wanted to scan, print, and display for others to see. I picked out forty. but desperately needed to get that number down. I ended up scanning twenty-seven, which I then narrowed down to twenty-two.
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