Bed of Grass

 

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While waiting for Claire during her violin lesson on Monday, I went into the no man's land at the end of the runway. (This is going to be intentionally vague, BTW.) If ever there was a Man Made Wilderness, this is one.  It was a fairly productive 45 minutes: 60 images. I was in some kind of photographic zone, but I'm afraid it was a "quantity" not "quality" one.

There are several observations about this issue, one that has been discussed elsewhere until the life of it has been drained totally dry. But I've got to add my two cents anyway.

When I go on one of these photographic sprees, it feels as if I'm using a shotgun approach to the location. It's a nice departure to look for a moment,  take an exposure , turn around, take an exposure, move a few feet, take an exposure , turn around again, take another exposure. It's  a release of the critical judgement that comes into play when using the large format. I can't work fast enough to operate in this manner, and the box of exposures would be too costly. But the shotgun technique hits a lot of different objects slightly, whereas taking the time to set up the 4 x 5 doesn't necessarily guarantee better results, but it does tend to force me to find the essence of the location and work on that in only a few exposures. It feels like I'm pre editing and digging in deeper than the casual glances of snapping away at everything.

The disparity in quality between a piece of 4 x 5 film and a 7 mega pixel p&s digicam is so great that my consideration of the end results it severely skewed towards the large format. I can't really take these "snapshots" very seriously, and I don't think it's the amount of effort involved to gather the images that is the issue. Or is it?

I study the 60 exposures that I came home with from Monday afternoon and think, "Hmmm, not too bad. Some decent stuff. Can't do anything with it (except post it on Man Made Wilderness.)"

I study three or four 4 x 5 exposures from a longer session in the field, and often think a pretty fair number of them look really nice. Better than decent. "Hmmm,  what am I going to do with this? Wish I could afford to make 4 foot x 5 foot prints. But where would they go, anyway?"

In fact, it looks as if the amount of time required to produce what appears to be fairly similar results on a web site is absolutely the issue. Given the ability to have the same result, why would you opt to spend more time on a given activity?

I'm still not ready to make the move to digital, though.