Zabriskie Point
The best known viewpoint in Death Valley whose pointed outcrop of rock, with geological layers visible, emerges sensationally from its surroundings at sunrise. Different from what its name would suggest, this national park offers an unending variety of most spectacular and spectacularly colored scenes.
8×10 inch photography
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Canyonlands
The American Southwest is home to the largest variety of spectacular scenic beauty that I know of. The effects of millennia of whatever it is that carves rocks has produced canyons that invariably take one’s breath away. Canyonlands is, I think, the most impressive of all. When was there first with my 8 x 10 Deardorff, in the 1970s things were less regulated than they are now, and the area was almost entirely freely accessible.
8×10 inch photography
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Britstlecone Pine
These trees are the oldest still living things in the world. Some go back roughly 5000 years. There is a concentration of them in the Inyo National Forest in California. They provide the photographer with some of the wildest contrasty tree forms imaginable.
8×10 inch photography
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Black Canyon of the Gunnison
Another spectacular Canyon, dark and lined with the most graphically rugged walls, created by the erosive force over the Gunnison River, is a scene one can come upon entirely unexpectedly. Approaching it through relatively flat pastoral landscape one would never imagine that something like this could be around the corner.
8×10 inch photography
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Bird Steps on White Sands
The advantage of a view camera – technical camera with independent front standard with lens board and rear standard holding the ground glass and film holders – is that one can alter the focal plane relative to the film plane in order to achieve depth of field that one could never achieve with the long focal length lenses required by this format. In the print made with this negative made in New Mexico one can count the grains of salt.
8×10 inch photography
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The 8 x 10 Deardorff that I picked up on a trip through the US changed my life. This incredible mahogany field camera with its leather bellows is beautiful through its utterly simple perfect design. Nothing on that camera was superfluous. It had no calibration of any sort; one had to do everything by touch.
Under the well-known black cloth you would be manipulating the brass knobs to focus and tilting the front standard to achieve sharpness. Objects right in front of you and at infinity were rendered sharp by tilting the lens plane, according to the so-called Scheimphlug principle. You composed the upside down image by moving the various parts without your eyes on them, as if playing a violin.With no other camera does one get the same sensation of being in control of the scene before you. I miss it, but then I don’t miss it at the same time because of the kilos of tripod, heavy lenses, and bags with a dozen or so sheet film holders one has to drag everywhere. The Deardorff was actually amazingly light, but all the
lenses were heavy, and I was doing this before the lighter carbon tripods had appeared on the scene.
Besides that you would have to carry at least one, but preferably two bags with film holders. These contain two sheets, but one normally exposed both of them for the same scene to make sure that what you had painstakingly set up would not later be spoiled by specks of dust or other mishaps.
In Japan I discovered the 4 x 5 inch format. But as I was working in total darkness for developing the sheet film, and in dim light enlarging the negatives, I began to wonder why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts – like the smell of hypo – for such a puny negative. It was of course better than 35mm and medium format, but still. That is why I switched to truly large-format. 8 x 10 inch, four times the size of what I had been working with until then.
Spider Rock
A tall rock formation in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument as viewed from a famous viewing place. The scene it looks down on is territory of the Navajo Nation, a separate world of agricultural activity.
8×10 inch photography
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Silo
Architectural beauty one may run into all over the West and Midwest of the United States. A feast of straight lines and wonderful interplay of different shades of light and shadow. If I remember correctly, this photograph was taken in Montana.
8×10 inch photography
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In Jack London’s Garden
A park attached to the home of the author Jack London in California. I’m not sure but I think that this is an image that would be very difficult to produce by digital photographic means.
8×10 inch photography
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Early Morning in Nagano
Taken roughly between six and seven on a winter morning in the Japan Alps of northern Japan, before the sun had been able to remove the mist that had rolled over the mountain ranges in the distant.
8×10 inch photography
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Morning Mist
Early morning in Fukushima prefecture of Japan.
8×10 inch photography
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The Race Track in Death Valley
The rock at the bottom was close to my feet, and the rock formation in the center was kilometers away, and the mountains behind it another long distance. Yet another example of the depth of field achieved by the so-called Scheimpflug principle with tilting the lens board. The scene is called the racetrack because rocks move over the desiccated surface by forces not entirely understood.
8×10 inch photography
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The Devil’s Golfcourse
Yet another one of the majestic scenes of Death Valley. It shows salt formations at the bottom of what used to be a gigantic lake. The edge of it, kilometers away, before the mountains in the far distance is sharply delineated as if drawn by a ruler due to the absence of any humidity in the atmosphere.
8×10 inch photography
printed in black and white, in large sizes only
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