It's all tabletop shots with digital backs on Sinar P cameras. His efficiency is based on those yaw-free asymmetric controls, which he knows instinctively by now. He'd never buy a camera without them, or probably own anything other than a Sinar.
James: what kind of wood does your Ebony 8x10 (I assume SV810U) have?. . . . Ebony? Mahogany?
Is most of your work studio/table-top, or landscapes?
SV810U ... Mahogany - I wanted Ebony, but it's hard to justify the extra weight when my field kit is already a bit ridiculous.
I shoot studio portraits and landscape / natural history images typically. My studio work doesn't typically require many movements, but in the landscape when the light is changing etc it's nice to be able to work fast. I was tempted to keep my Arca Swiss for the studio work, but I decided it was more important to have have the muscle memory for just one camera not two.
As I mentioned before Asymmetric Axis can mean quite different things. Static asymmetric axis, movable axis, kind of movement of axis etc.
So the Linhof approach yields
-) deliberate choice of location for both vertical and horizontal axis
-) deliberate choice of axis location without having to give up framing
Features the Sinar P does not offer.
I can do that without asymmetric movements.
I looked at a Linhof TL once, one model before the Master GTL, which is the one with the movable asymmetric tilt/swing axes. Beautiful camera and it was available at a good price for a second hand 8x10/5x7/4x5 kit. It's much heavier than a Sinar P, over-engineered in typical Linhof style. In an absolute sense, given unlimited resources, the Master GTL is a superior camera to the Sinar P2.
Other considerations, however, are that Linhof studio cameras are fairly uncommon in the US, while Sinar was the basic workhorse of its day, like the Nikon F2, so there are Sinar bits and pieces everywhere over here, and if you live in a town with a rental house, you can easily rent lenses mounted on Sinar boards, while that isn't the case for Linhof studio cameras. Sinars are modular and designed to be compatible across models, so you can mix and match F, P, and Norma parts, easily add extra rails and intermediate standards that are not hard to find. So for practical purposes, in terms of equipment available on the ground at very reasonable prices, the Sinar studio system makes more sense.
Also the scales make it fairly simple to adjust rise/fall/shift to find the tilt/swing angle, and then reverse the rise/fall/shift after tilting to restore the original composition, as well as transferring tilt/swing from the rear to the front axis.
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