good 4x5 prints; hand made books; backpacking larger format cameras

[Shannon Stoney <shannonstoney@earthlink.net>]

Tom wrote:

> Yes there are exceptions. Arg... brain freeze.. I can picture her images,
> but not her name.. midwest photographer who does wonderful staged pinhole
> images, all about 4x5 inches.... (sound of Tom hitting head against desk,
> and still not remembering).

Do these involve a little boy doll having various adventures?  If so, I saw
them at the Houston Center for Photography.  They were cool.  One thing that
made them successful I thought was that there wasn't a lot of teensy detail:
the "sets" for the little dramas were fairly simple with clean lines.
Everything was a bit fuzzy too (maybe the pinhole effect), so that teensy
details would have been out of place.  The doll would be interacting with a
pear or something on a fairly neutral ground. I think one problem with my
prints is that
there is a lot of detail and you have to look carefully to see it.

I saw a print of yours at the cyanotype site and liked it a lot: the one
called "Birds" I think.  I think it would look good in most formats, small
to large.

Joe and someone else (sorry, I lost the message) mentioned handmade
books--do y'all mean books that someone else made by hand, and you buy them
and mount pictures in them, or do you  make your own hand bound books?  I
would like to learn to do that.  Also the presentation box with mounted
prints in it is a good idea for small prints I think.

I wonder if there is a big difference between the "presence" that a 5x7
print has and that of a 4x5 print. I would like to get a larger camera and
I'm trying to decide between 8x 10 and 5x7 format for my larger camera.  I
carry my camera around my neighborhood in a backpack; how much heavier is an
8x10 camera than a 5x7 or 4x5?  The 4x5 and all its gear is not heavy at all
to me, at least for my relatively short outings of an hour or two.

--shannon