I’m officially on holiday. And so what do photographers do on their holidays? They go and make photos :-) I’ve brought along my Ebony 23SW field camera. It is a medium-format film camera that is like a large-format camera that has been shrunk down to medium format.

I think a camera with movements is an extremely powerful shooting device. If a little on the slow side to set up. In a way I really like the slow process. It is all about correcting perspectives if one wishes to do that, and so a geared head is really important.

In the photo above you can see that I’m using rise/fall on the camera to look down at the foreground while keeping the verticals vertical :-) No converging lines, and nothing leaning forward in the frame.

It’s a system I love to use when the occasion demands it. I would like to really use this kind of system a bit more on my travels as it would also allow me to get closer to foregrounds. With larger formats it’s a case that your depth of field decreases as you go up the focal lengths. In a way, the most versatile system for maximum depth of field is Micro-Four-Thirds and the least versatile is large format. Medium format is restrictive when moving from 35mm to medium format. You have less depth of field at your disposal. So having movements and tilt can help reduce that issue somewhat.

I also enjoy composing the picture upside down. I think there is value in working this way. By turning images upside down we abstract them. We also force our eye into areas of the picture that we do not normally visit: we all have a tendency to walk around a frame a particular way, so if the image is inverted or rotated we end up walking the same way, but into different parts of the image. I wish all modern digital cameras had a feature to allow us to flip the image sideways and upside down. It would help us spot issues in the compositions at best, and at least it would allow us to learn to see what is really going on in our pictures before we take them.