Field camera for portraiture

[Frank Szabo]

Frank, an interesting comment of yours. It begs the question, given that I use the same film and lens aperture for my Shen Hao as I would for my Mamiya RB, why would my sitter have to "sit still" for the field camera and not the Mamiya?

Rather a simple answer to this one.

With the Hasselblad or RB67 I can adjust the focus up to the point of tripping the shutter.

With any LF-type camera, one must close the lens (that was opened for focusing), load the film holder, pull the slide, and hope my subject hasn't swayed toward or away from the camera while I wasn't paying attention, thereby knocking said subject out of sharp focus.

The cure for this is to select an aperture tight enough to allow for any slight motion, but then the photographer is compromising on the zone of sharp focus (many of the 'elite' use the term 'bokeh') selected. This order of 'problems' will occur with either a field camera or a full-motion view camera as the "ready, aim, shoot" process is identical.

The 'length of string' you mentioned is (my opinion only) good for light placement but I feel not accurate enough for any attempt at focusing a camera; however, it will give a person a starting point.

That's not to say one can't do portraiture with LF - it's just a little more of a pain in the posterior, but unless the subject is somewhat familiar with LF photo procedures, they can get rather testy in a hurry.

That's been my experience, anyway.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

The Shen-Hao will do you just fine for your purposes. If you want to use a longer lens like a 300mm or 360mm for front/rear compression and background separation, I'd suggest the Walker Titan, or if a Walker is in your budget, also look at a Canham Woodfield. Both will give you tons of movement and more bellows extension than the Shen Hao. I have a Shen Hao, and a Canham, and I love them both.

 

[Colin Corneau]

I've used a Crown for environemental portraits, travelling overseas. A great idea, light and fast, tough and very portable.

I recently bought a Shen Hao and it's great too. But I found the Crown was faster set-up if you're doing that kind of shooting only.

There was a Linhof Super Tecnika (sp?) for sale here in the past day or two...same basic set-up as the Crown and it seemed to be at a very good price.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I think that if you want movements at all, for any reason, you'll find the Crown/Speed Graphic extremely limiting immediately. They have front rise, a little bit of front shift, and a little bit of front tilt, mostly so you can use wide-angle lenses on them (drop the bed and tilt the front standard back so you can get it back to vertical, keeping the bed out of the field of view). By comparison, a Shen, Canham or Walker can be turned into a pretzel.