Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Rodney Lough photography

When I was in San Francisco I happened to wander through this guy’s gallery on Peer 39. I was amazed by his photography and thought his scenery shots were gorgeous, but of particular interest was the camera type he uses. I know nothing about these F-line, slide film cameras. I thought it was pretty wild that one could get the deep of field clarity with such a small aperture and the cool water falls and flowing water with long exposures without blowing the highlights. I don’t recall exactly what they were and seam to recall apertures over 60 and exposures around 10 seconds. Any of you photographers shoot with one of these cameras? This looks to be expensive……

http://www.theloughroad.com/index.html?d...F2nDd21D8WG9ER.

I don't know how he does it but they're better than real life.

I've always wanted to experiment with a large format camera. I have an old medium format camera, and looking at the 6cm square transparency on a lightbox is mesmerizing enough - I can't image how incredible it must be when your original frame is 8x10 inches! The detail must be insane!

Also, the larger the format, the less depth of field you're going to get at any given f-stop. Where f/8 is usually enough on a 35mm slr to get you pretty good depth of field, on an 8x10 camera I think the equivalent stop would be somewhere around f/32. most 35mm lenses smallest stop is 22 (some go to 32), but I know a lot of LF lenses go to f/64. The relationship between focal length and field of view is also similarly changed.

It seems to be a lot of work and patience to work with large format (everything is manually set), but I think it'd be really cool to give it a shot (pardon the pun :)).

those are some amazing photos...almost like those places do not exist on earth.

He's got one of a mountain / lake I drive by all the time. I've never seen it look as good as he caputured though.

So how do you compensate for long exposure times with good light using these cameras? Do you use ND filters of some sort?

I think Mark Johnson uses one of these... Mark??

I see he uses Velvia film - which is probably the most popular film ever made for landscape photography, and for very good reason. I've used it a lot, and it really is fantastic film especially in early morning or late evening late, the saturation, detail and contrast is just incredible.

Even with good light, exposure times are pretty long with LF (unless you're indoors with studio lights and or shooting portraits/shots with small depth of fields). ND filters would only increase the exposure times, so you pretty much just suck it up and wait. Big sturdy tripods are a must for LF, obviously.

This is seriously on planet earth?

Looks like fountains coming from mountains...

Total lack of knowledge when it comes to photography but the talk of exposure and film differences to create these masterpieces did spawn a question in my head. With the move towards digital photography, are the top end digitals able to compensate for things like film type/brand and such as mentioned in this thread?

Just curious, I have too many expensive hobbies to start another but asking questions is free...

His stuff is amazing. My comment on his vote page was that it was like looking at our planet through a brand new, shiny set of eyes.

Absolutely, Murph. Although I have to say there is something magical about Velvia film that I have yet to see convincingly replicated with digital. Most decent digital SLRs have several different color modes now (presets with different contrast, saturation, color tone, etc) and basic b&w modes, too, but I don't think there are any out there that actually try to mimic different film types. There are 3rd part computer programs that try their best to do that, though.

The big benefit to digital is that you can give it any kind of color cast, saturation, contrast curves that you can by processing the file in programs like Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, etc. The downside is that you usually don't get the right contrast, color, and saturation without having to process it on the computer, at least in "fine art" photography. Not that I'm calling my stuff fine art, but I post process every shot I take (except for quick snapshots).