From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 12/17/02-04:00:04 AM Z
Shannon, your posts are great. I love the mental picture of you spying
on the cows with your telephoto lens.
This has been an interesting and educational thread. I didn't know, for
instance, that people don't use telephoto lenses for landscape. I do it
all the time, or did when I was shooting 35mm; in fact I used a 100mm
lens as my standard everyday lens. I wouldn't consider 100mm a
telephoto, but I'm just saying that as a rule I like to shoot longer and
closer than what's generally considered "normal" Unfortunately my
longest lens for the 8x10 is 16" As Sandy points out, the 8x10
equivalent to my "normal" 100mm would be 24" and even a telephoto
equivalent of a 200mm lens would exceed my bellows draw. So I can't
shoot landscape in large format the way I'd like to and am still
struggling to find a way to make the large format camera a tool that
serves my "vision" of landscape. One interim solution I've come up with
is to fix a pinhole to a lensboard and stretch the bellows out as far as
it will go, which is around 30".
I also didn't know that a landscape photograph is supposed to show a
panoramic vista and what's more, to show proper "photographic"
perspective and to represent "reality" accurately. Says who?
Katharine Thayer
Shannon Stoney wrote:
>
> Maybe the confusion here arises from the fact that when most people think of
> landscape, they think of sweeping panoramas out West. In my neighborhood,
> though, there aren't many big views. There's one hill where you can see the
> whole neighborhood from that hill, because it's been cleared for a pasture,
> but a lot of the neighborhood is wooded, so you can't see for a long
> distance. When I was walking around with my viewfinder, with the 4x5 hole
> in it, if I held it say arm's length from my face, I found all sorts of
> little scenes that I couldn't photograph because of my slightly wide angle
> lens. The best one was a backlit clothesline with an old truck and some
> other junk behind it. I really wanted that little slice of that backyard.
> But when I got close enough to make the clothes line look right in the
> ground glass, the truck didn't look the same any more. It looked sort of
> too far away or something. So that made me think it might be interesting to
> prowl my neighborhood with a telephoto lens. It would make it easier to spy
> on the cows too.
>
> Now that I know how to use the viewfinder right, though, I am finding all
> sorts of other interesting views. I can get up close to something and
> photograph it almost like a still life, yet still see a cow way in the
> distance in one corner of the picture. This gives a sense of deep space and
> intimate space at the same time (I hope).
>
> One of my goals is to expand the notion of landscape to include tighter
> spaces such as exist in the southeast, and probably on the east coast. I
> think our view of landscape is too dominated by the Western way of
> landscape, probably because the first really great landscape photographers
> of the 19th century photographed out there, and because landscape painting
> has usually leaned toward big views of wide and deep space. But the
> landscape I actually live in is more like a path that opens onto little
> scenes or still lifes.
>
> --shannon
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