How do you handle seeing things upside down on the ground glass?

This is in VERY bad taste, but fully characteristic of the kinds of stories climbers share among themselves. We hired an old lady as a cashier here who was once the girlfriend of the first guy who climbed El Capitan and still went to visit cronies at Camp 4 from time to time. My nephew was living with me
at the time, attending UCB, and climbed on the weekends. He had climbed El Capitan at least a hundred times at that point, including rebolting the Dawn
Wall - (which recent press releases claim two guys "free-climbed" - well... they did use their hands, but fell hundreds of times in the process, and were
secured the whole time by that very bolt ladder - so kinda a stretch to call it free-climbing). Anyway, one day my nephew walked into the store with a piece of bone he found on a narrow ledge and asked what kind of animal could have made clear up onto the cliff like that. I recognized the suture pattern and told him it was no animal. Then he turned sickly pale. Worse still, the old cashier personally knew the person involved. After climbing El Cap one day, the guy planned to rappel down the Heart face using about twenty rope lengths, but forgot to tie off the very first rappel. So ever since there has been a sick joke around Camp 4 how this fellow set a "speed descent" record on El Capitan "which has been matched but never exceeded".

Now to try and salvage that story... When my nephew was scouting out his route of the Dawn Wall redo, it was right after one of the heaviest snowfalls
I've ever seen in Yosemite Valley. No cars could get in or out for three days. Nobody was around. A giant ice cone had formed under frozen El Capitan Falls. So we stomped over there to the cliff thru the deep snow. I had about a 75 lb pack with a bunch of Sinar gear in it. Then I hacked my way up that
ice cone with the ice axe, chiseled off the top, and got what was probably a totally unique edge-on shot of the monolith, at least with a large format
camera. One of maybe only four pictures I ever taken in Yosemite Valley. I spend most of my time in the high country instead. But as the sun tried to
peek out, an enormous slab of water ice, maybe sixty feet across, came sailing down from the upper part of the fall. Most of these flat chunks would
kinda sail and hit the powder snow well away from the face. But this monster landed only about ten yards away! So I put the pack back one and glissaded
down that damn sixty-degree cone consisting largely of water ice itself. Still amazes me I survived that ride intact.

Iiiiiiiiyaaaa eeeeeeeeeeeeee...


phew...

trondsi said:

Have you simply gotten used to seeing it upside down, or do you have any tricks up your sleeves?

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It helps if you know what it is you are going to photograph, so even upside down you know to put that tree at that edge, make sure that rock in the foreground appears at the bottom (top), square it up with a spirit level, stand back and judge which blade of grass to focus on, and you have your composition. So it isn't looking at the ground glass screen that is important, it is standing back and looking at the scene and memorising the important bits before you put your head under the darkcloth. If you forget what the scene looks like don't rotate your head upside down because it will still be back to front anyway, stand up and look at the scene again. Pretty soon you forget you are seeing things upside down and reversed and can easily judge the final small adjustments to composition. What nobody should do with LF is what many 35mm photographers do, waive your camera about waiting for a composition to appear in the viewfinder.

Steve

Use it to your advantage. If the shapes and lines look compositionally strong upside down and in reverse, so will the final image....

250swb said:

It helps if you know what it is you are going to photograph, so even upside down you know to put that tree at that edge, make sure that rock in the foreground appears at the bottom (top), square it up with a spirit level, stand back and judge which blade of grass to focus on, and you have your composition. So it isn't looking at the ground glass screen that is important, it is standing back and looking at the scene and memorising the important bits before you put your head under the darkcloth. If you forget what the scene looks like don't rotate your head upside down because it will still be back to front anyway, stand up and look at the scene again. Pretty soon you forget you are seeing things upside down and reversed and can easily judge the final small adjustments to composition. What nobody should do with LF is what many 35mm photographers do, waive your camera about waiting for a composition to appear in the viewfinder.

Steve

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Sounds like good advice!

only one thing: if I look into the ground glass from above, like I sometimes do (it's easy since I usually don't extend the tripod all the way) nothing is flipped around in any direction (left and right correspond to my left and right). Everything is seen the normal way, and appears exactly like it will in the photograph.

My mentor, on hearing me say "but it is upside down" on my first foray under the dark-cloth some 63 years ago, corrected my statement with a "No.... it is downside-up".

Ken

DREW WILEY said:

Speaking of bats, the darkcloth also comes in handy when you use it as your batsuit when jumping off cliffs with a GoPro camera attached to
your head. Your pictures will be worth more after you're dead anyway.

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I have always preferred cordless bungee jumping. That way I do not have to worry about the LF equipment getting fouled up in the bungee cords.

Clearly, this issue is all due to cameras engineered for the Southern hemisphere being marketed in the Northern, and visa versa. If you happen to live on the equator, you'll need a special split-image groundglass.

I always thought it had to do with poor quality control - the GGs were consistently installed upside down.

when I see things upside down I know its time to stop drinking.

DREW WILEY said:

Clearly, this issue is all due to cameras engineered for the Southern hemisphere being marketed in the Northern, and visa versa. If you happen to live on the equator, you'll need a special split-image groundglass.

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Thank you for clarifying that.

Some of the best photographic compositions come from historical images where photographers were using LF and got use to seeing things upside down as they viewed the ground glass screen.

Fuming plates with mercury cured the problem.

RobC said:

when I see things upside down I know its time to stop drinking.

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So true

RobC said:

when I see things upside down I know its time to stop drinking.

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I stop when I see things on their sides.