First Time with 4x5

Over this past summer, as part of my university program, I had the opportunity to take a class on large format photography. We had the choice of using either a rail or field style 4x5 large format camera. I selected the more portable field camera, a Toyo Field 45A. Our assigned work was to first focus on places, then on people/portraits, then to finally tie it all together into one complete project. I decided to focus my work on Vancouver, first taking the camera into the city, and up to the Vancouver Lookout.

The Vancouver Lookout is a circular floor in Harbour Centre building in downtown Vancouver, one level down from the Top of Vancouver revolving restaurant. The angled windows look over and down at the city skyline to the west with English Bay behind, the north shore and mountains, East Van with Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Mountain campus in the distance, and other city centres to the south and south-east. I focused the camera looking through the windows at the dense buildings of Vancouver’s downtown centre. My goal was to fill the frame with the geometric and angular shapes of the city, lit by the bright high-contrast sunlight.

After getting the cityscape shots I wanted, and taking several with my regular digital camera, I took the field camera back down to street level. Even though I didn’t yet need to move on to the next part of the course work, I wanted to try a few street shots. I attempted to get a couple of the crowds around Canada Place with minimal results, before moving to an intersection up the street. With a camera like this it’s not hard to get people’s attention, and they’re generally very interested in what it is. Before long a few people had gathered asking about it, and I got one person interested in posing for a photo.

For the people and portraits section of the class work I wanted to stay in the city. My approach was to attempt a sort of pseudo street photography. Street photography is normally a candid and stealthy practice, something not particularly suited to a large format camera that requires setting up in a tripod, taking a light reading, carefully focusing, then loading a film holder into the camera to finally take a photo.

The first outing was to the Waterfront area of Vancouver around Canada Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre. The weather was very rainy in contrast to the bright sun of the earlier day. My friend Dimitri came along as well to help out which turned out to be much needed. This photo shoot was also a lesson in how to be careful and keep track of what you’re doing with large format cameras. While I did end up with a couple of good photographs, my favourite of which has Dimitri featured, there was a few issues as well.

From a mix of wrangling an umbrella to keep the rain off the camera, not keeping a well organized bag of supplies, and still learning the rhythm of shooting with this sort of camera I ended up with one sheet of film accidentally knocked out of it’s holder, another partially uncovered while in its holder resulting in a half white photo, and one accidental double exposure with two different images overlapped on the same piece of film. Large format is a medium to be slow and careful with.

For the second attempt I went to Granville Island, a very touristy place in Vancouver with waterfront boardwalks and views of the downtown core. I mounted the camera on the tripod, opened up the bellows, attached a lens, and proceeded to carry the whole thing around half set up while looking for shots. For every person I took a photo of I spoke to them first, asking to take a photo, and quietly set up to let them continue what they were doing; a couple sitting by the water, a mother watching her kids, a shop worker in the Granville Island Market, etc. This time the weather was nicer for a slightly smoother experience.

To make these shots more interesting I brought with me a 90mm lens, as opposed to the 150mm one I had used up to this point. When using cameras with imaging surfaces different in size from full-frame, or 135 format, the given focal length of a lens provides a different angel of view as opposed to the same focal lengths used on 135. This is represented with a multiplier number called a crop factor. For example, APS-C format cameras have a smaller sensor than their full-frame siblings, and have a crop factor of 1.5 on average. So if you use a 30mm lens on an APS-C camera the field of view in the resulting image is approximately the same as a 45mm lens on full-frame/135. The higher the mm number, the narrower the field of view.

4x5 large format film, being dramatically larger than the more common 135 format (4x5 inches vs 24x36 millimetres), has an inverse crop factor of 0.28, or roughly one third. This means that the 90mm lens I had mounted on the day shooting in Granville Island produces an angel of view roughly equivalent to a 30mm full-frame lens. This is within the range of common wide-standard focal lengths used in street photography. For portraits the slight push-pull effect and wide-ish angle distortion encourage you to move closer to your subject, introducing a level of intimacy by placing the viewer closer to the personal space of the subject.

Keeping my idea for the final project in mind I tried to focus on photographing people while still showcasing the surrounding city that they were a part of, blending the portraits into the cityscapes. My artist statement for the piece ended up drawing on the concept that in a city the dense population can disappear into its geometric inanimate shapes when viewed from certain perspectives. But underneath, viewed up close, it is composed entirely of people going about their lives without knowing much about each other. To exemplify the idea of anonymity I didn’t ask any of the people in my photos for their names. We talked about what they were doing, why they were there, and what their connection was to the space around them, but not their names. This was an attempt to humanize the people that comprise a city to both me as the photographer and the viewers of the images, without knowing who the subjects are.

All of the photos were shot on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 film, and I processed all of the film by hand in the university’s photo lab. I used a Hasselblad scanner to scan the negatives at high resolution (resulting in eye-wateringly large 500 megabyte files for every image, thirty times the size of the RAW files from my regular camera). Going back to film from digital is one thing on 135 or even medium format. But once you work with the detail you can capture on these massive 4x5 negatives it’s hard to go back.

For the final display I took a lot of time to carefully clean up the photos, and decide on a layout and size for each image. I wanted the photographs to slot together in a clean geometric layout like the buildings in the images. At the recommended resolution for printing, the images from my 24 megapixel digital camera will print at about 11 inches by 16.5 inches. With the resolution they were scanned at, the 4x5 images natively printed at 20 inches by 25 inches. The central cityscape image I included was the largest, and was upscaled with resampling to print at 40 inches by 56 inches. With that print at nearly 4 feet by 5 feet, and the others arranged either side, the final piece filled the nearly 20ft long wall they were displayed on (don’t mind the haphazard mounting with pins and the angled photo, there was little time and little space).

I attempted to start making a miniature version of the piece with analogue darkroom prints as well, starting with 4x5 contact prints for the smallest photos and scaling up enlargements from there. But I ran out of time and instead digitally printed a mini version on one sheet of paper. That was partially for fun, but also so that I could have a copy of the work that I could actually put up in my apartment, because I don’t have any wall space large enough to fit the full size project.

I’d like to continue this work, both out of fascination and enjoyment of large format photography, and because I think there is more to play with in this concept. When planning to do the street portraits I thought about how difficult it might be to mount a handle to the field camera, rather than a tripod, and rely on zone focusing and a fast shutter speed for some truly from-the-hip street photography. But that’s an idea to workshop another time.