Show Some Of Your Creative Work With Movements

Ian-Barber

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I am always looking for inspiration and thought it may be nice to see some work from others who have used camera movements for creattivity such as front swing etc
 
Front (or rear) swing is something I rarely use and when I do it's subtle. Rear tilt and corresponding front rise is something I'll use creatively with a low view point to give a greater feeling of depth in a landscape.


clee02sm.jpg


Mineral (colliery) tramway, Clee Hills.
clee03sm.jpg


Dhu Stone former quarry railway track bed, Clee Hills.

Ian
 
Here's one. Bourges Cathedral. Front swing with the line from the first lamp on the left to the right tower of the cathedral.

This was a joint effort between Helen and me. Her framing and my focusing :)

The only really annoying thing was that there was a really picturesque Citroën 2CV parked on the right but the owner got in and drove it off before we were ready to take the shot.

BourgesCathedral.jpg
 
Rear tilt and corresponding front rise is something I'll use creatively with a low view point to give a greater feeling of depth in a landscape.

Do you use rear tilt to exaggerate the size of the foreground
 
I'd rather not use the term exaggerate because you could be more extreme in both my examples, but yes greater emphasis of the foreground. I'd guess the first image was made with a 150mm and the second with a 90mm, choice of lens is equally as important.

Ian
 
A very nice shot in what looks like tricky lighting.
Back tilt is often used by landscape photographers to exaggerate the conventional Big Rock in the foreground, but it does this by tinkering with the geometry of the scene.
In this case, rear tilt would have given the same geometric effect as pointing the camera upwards and the towers, together with the windows on the right, would have tapered upwards. If the verticals in the picture are to remain vertical, the back must be vertical too.
In this case, Joanna has wanted to keep the hanging lamp on its delicate bracket sharp, but retain some sharpness in the towers. Simply focusing on the lamp would have left the background unsharp. She's done an excellent job and presumably stopped down a good deal, because the windows on the right-hand wall seem reasonably sharp too. Rear swing might have done a similar job, but in that case the relative sizes of the two walls would have been altered. (In he same way that the foreground rock is exaggerated.) I assume that using front swing was an aesthetic choice, although some cameras don't have rear swing. (Even some Ebony cameras.)
To visualise alternative renderings, we can suppose that the right hand wall was important. For example, a famous person may have lived there. In that case, the image could have been a little different. There's not enough space to erect a tripod directly opposite the wall for a flat view, but a cunning use of rear swing could have changed its relative size. I'm sure that Joanna knows more about this sort of thing than I do.
It's a situation that Atget faced when making his records of Old Paris in very narrow streets.
In this image, if an exaggerated foreground was really needed, perhaps because there was significant detail, (a reflection in a puddle?) on the road, the only solution would be to use a wider lens, but that would drastically alter the whole image and the towers would appear much smaller. Dropping the front to show more foreground would cut off the top of the towers. It would be an entirely different picture.
If I may ramble a bit more, Joanna's story illustrates one of the constant dilemmas of LF photography. She has taken an excellent, perfectly focused and exposed image, but she could have settled for a slightly less perfect image with the all-too-transient delight of the 2CV.
Much the same situation arises with shafts of sunlight, or approaching storms, or incoming tides. I've watched videos of LF photographers in (I think) Yosemite, obliged to take their shot when the scene became momentarily free from the swarm of rucksack-ed couples tottering between the photogenic rocks. The usual solution is to hike there in darkness and set up before dawn, but the sun isn't always in the right place at dawn.
 
Ian, is this photograph you made of Dhu Stone former quarry railway track bed, Clee Hills. part of a project you are doing.

clee03sm.jpg
 
Yes, it's part of a project I started in the mid 1980's but I still keep adding to it however it needs more work to bring it together. I started the project with my Mamiya 645 and it was frustration with a lack of movements that made me switch to 5x4 and buying my Wista 45DX, I'd been using LF for work for over 10 years but my monorail camera was too heavy and cumbersome for landscape work.

It's rare I shoot LF outside my projects, I'm more likely to use my TLRs for non project work. However I do have quite a few ongoing projects, some limited by distance and the frequency I can travel there, but there are common strands that ten to link them. I had a discussion about this with Paul Womble (Impressions Gallery, York and later The Photographers Gallery, London) a few years ago - he advised not being limited to just working my local vicinity, I was able to indicate/show I wasn't.

I realised this image I posted before probably has the most tilt I've used for emphasis. It's quite an early image made outside an existing project but with one idea I was thinking of, photographing "Plague" villages, there's.

upload_2018-5-10_11-3-23.jpeg

Ian
 
@David M We were actually interested in getting a shot of the cathedral front; the narrow street was more or less imposed on us by the surrounding area. If you look at Google maps and street view https://goo.gl/maps/sSRyb3QndiD2, you'll see what I mean :rolleyes:

Nonetheless, we tried to maximise the opportunity by "getting creative" and getting everything tack sharp, including the houses in the street :)
 
Joanna, I understand. You've turned a problem into a solution – a fine example of creative control. There are similar views of York Minster, that present similar problems, South Transept, seen from a side street, by Edwin Smith, for instance.
No doubt the Bechers would have erected scaffolding directly in front and got a typical, very literal, Becher picture. I like your view much better. We want to walk down that street and see what lies at the end. More precisely, we want to stroll...
 
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Well! I never knew we were in such illustrious company when we took the shot :cool:

Thanks for your comments; it's always nice to have someone appreciate our work :)
 
Here is one taken on the North York Moors on the path to Danby Beacon.Path to Danby Beacon.jpg Front tilt, the only movement I have on my home-made 5x4 camera. Kodak 203mm Ektar lens, Foma 200 film developed in Rodnal.

Alan
 
I'll play...

Here's one I took with my 10x8 using rear backward tilt. I used this movement because I wanted the watery shape in the immediate foreground to "loom" giving a feeling of being on the edge--you might fall in. ;)

SnowField.jpg
 
Just thought of another one in my portfolio. Sorry for the crappy cell phone pic; I don't have many scans of these images. Here I used backward rear tilt to place the plane of focus down along the upper surfaces of the rocks in the foreground and the waves/water in the background. This simple technique enabled me to use the shutter speed / aperture combination that I wanted.

Brook.jpg
 
Bloody Heck Alan! I'll have to move house to accommodate all of these stunning images in my home gallery!

How do I get them on my walls!

Robert
 
Not so much creative as downright necessary. I had a fence right against my back, and as much rise on the 90mm as the Wista's bellows would permit. This is the former Mare Island naval facility in Vallejo, California. It is being gradually returned to civilian use. At the far end of the gantry is the ship mooring.

gantry.jpg
 
Front (or rear) swing is something I rarely use and when I do it's subtle. Rear tilt and corresponding front rise is something I'll use creatively with a low view point to give a greater feeling of depth in a landscape.


clee02sm.jpg


Mineral (colliery) tramway, Clee Hills.
clee03sm.jpg


Dhu Stone former quarry railway track bed, Clee Hills.

Ian

Ian, I have been meaning to ask you. In these 2 photographs, I can see a slight tones to them which for me is un-usual because of my colour-blind issues and I like it. Have you applied the tone on these images your have uploaded digitally to match the tone of the wet print ?
 
Ian, I have been meaning to ask you. In these 2 photographs, I can see a slight tones to them which for me is un-usual because of my colour-blind issues and I like it. Have you applied the tone on these images your have uploaded digitally to match the tone of the wet print ?

Probably, before I started working with negative scans I'd re-photographed all my exhibition prints with a DSLR using studio flash lighting, this gave me a good digital match in terms of the darkroom prints tones and colour. So yes matched in PAintshop Pro, CorelPhotopaint, or GIMP.

I only print on Warmtone paper and always Selenium tone sometimes to the point of splitting. I'm finishing off my last Forte Polywarmtone and have already stocked up with Ilford Warmtone paper after some tests. I made a print on MGIV recently after first printing on Polywarmtone, the difference side by side is very noticeable,

gordon1a.jpg
gordon-neutral.jpg


Ian
 

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