View camera

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Glossary Terms

A view camera is one in which the lens casts its image directly onto a ground-glass screen at the rear of the camera, where the photographer views it for framing and focusing. Such cameras are usually large format, i.e. at least 4x5 inches or 9x12 cm (but not always; miniature Graphics such as the Century Graphic use roll film, but are view cameras).

Field cameras such as the Tachihara, or a similar camera a hundred years older, technical cameras with a boxy rear body like the Wista 45, and monorail cameras such as the Graphic View are all view cameras. There are also tailboard cameras and two-rail cameras.

Taking pictures with a large-format camera is generally more complex and time-consuming (and expensive!) than with smaller roll-film cameras, so they're usually used for carefully-selected subjects, such as landscapes, architecture, or portraiture. Because the film is so much larger, the image quality is correspondingly higher. With larger cameras, such as 8x10 inches, prints can be made from negatives simply by contact printing.

In a view camera, the scene is composed and focused on a ground glass screen; a sheet of glass which has been ground (rough-textured) on one side (the side facing the lens, generally) to capture a focused image. When the ground glass is placed in the film plane in the back of the camera and the lens opened wide, the scene is projected on the glass, upside-down and reversed left-right. The photographer can then use this projected image to frame the scene and focus it, often with the aid of a magnifier (loupe). A dark cloth placed over the back of the camera, under which the photographer ducks, shields the glass from light and makes it easier to see.

Once the image is framed and focused to the photographer's satisfaction, a piece of film is placed at the location of the ground-glass screen. In a typical large-format camera, this is a sheet of film in a dark slide, slid in front of the ground-glass without removing it. Smaller view cameras for roll film may require the screen to be removed to fit the film holder. Some modern view cameras can be used with a medium-format sensor; again, this will probably require the ground-glass to be removed (but with a sensor, it is likely that a live view would be used rather than the ground glass anyway).

Some, but not all, view cameras have controls which allow the geometric relationship of the film, lens and subject to be changed from their normal arrangement. (The "normal" setup is where the film and lens planes are parallel, with the film centered on the axis of the lens.) Such controls, known as tilts, shifts and swings (or just "movements" in general), allow the lens and film to be shifted and tilted with respect to each other, and with respect to the subject. These kinds of controls (sometimes erroneously called "perspective control", since they don't actually change the perspective—that can only be done by moving the entire camera with respect to the subject), enable the photographer, for example, to take a picture of a tall building looking upward and to correct the converging lines which naturally occur. Camera movements can also be used to control which parts of a scene are in focus, and to increase the depth of field of a picture. For example, when photographing a subject in the foreground against a landscape, if the lensboard is tilted forward, this will allow the subject at the bottom of the frame and the background above it to be in relatively better focus.



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