[LargeFormat] Palm software for large format photography

[Paul and Paula Butzi]

> Call me a heretic or a Luddyte, but a pad and pencil has no problem  being
> seen in daylight, needs no batteries, will work in cold weather and is
> inexpensive. Supplimentary firm or hardware such as a grease pencil on the
> film holder guarrantees accurate info for that sheet of film. these are a
> bit harder to "download" on to a PC, but no more difficult than trying to
> figure out why the info you downloaded from your PDA went into al the wrong
> fields and you have garbage on your screen.
Right now on rec.photo.equipment.large-format, there's a thread discussing using
digital cameras as compositional tools.  I'm just guessing, but I suspect you
find that to be a bit weird, too!  (so do I)

> Like the kid in the comics that's so bookish, he has to calculate the
> tragectory and velocity before he can throw a pass when playing touch
> football with his brother, all of this software causes a great loss of
> sponentanety/intutiveness/magic of LF.

This is a really interesting comment.  A lot of people who work in large format
talk quite a lot (typically in their artist's statements!) about the slower, more
deliberate/contemplative style of large format.  Indeed, I was one of those
people for quite a while.

Then, a couple of years ago, I did a largish project using a *hand camera*. 
The ease of making many exposures and the short time between picking the
camera up and making an exposure were a delight.  And, going over my
backlog of LF negatives, I concluded that sometimes I make good decisions
about what's worth an exposure, and sometimes I make bad ones.  My conclusion
was that I was *walking away* from good photographs without making exposures
primarily because I felt they weren't worth the investment of twenty to twenty-five
minutes of setting up/exposing/taking down with detailed record keeping.

On the next one week trip, my motto was not 'quality at slow
speed' but 'quantity *is* quality'.  My goal was to work quickly, intuitively, make
each exposure as quickly as possible, and then move on to the next one.  No
painstakingly adjusted camera movements, no anal-retentive note taking, no
ten minutes of anguished zone system calculations.  No agonized consideration
of compositional options - if more than one option seemed promising, make
more than one exposure.  No hour-long pondering over each image, no
more mornings where, despite great conditions, artistic paralysis resulted
in one exposure (and a mediocre one at that).  

I practiced until I could
place the tripod, put the camera on the 'pod, put the lens in the camera, compose,
focus, expose, pack it all up - all in a four minute window; that was about five
times faster than I'd worked at the more 'deliberate, contemplative' pace.
(I'm faster than this now).

During that trip, in one morning, I made 25 exposures in what worked out to
about a 3 hour period.  I headed back to the car with *TWO* sheets of unexposed
film.  

I get a *lot* more images I like when I get all this nit-picking record-keeping out
of the process.  I have sheets of stickers labeled 'N', "n-1", "N+1" etc in the bag;
after each exposure, I slap a label on it, jam it in the 'exposed' section of the film
box, and move on.  When I unload the pack, I write the location on each film packet
(I use Readyloads) and so I keep them straight that way.

If using a PDA would let you strip your process down to the barest essentials,
then I could see it would be a good thing.  But I suspect that it could easily be
just another distraction from the creative/intuitive aspect of the process.

I know that for many, the whole point of going with large format is to *slow down*.
The advantage of large format is that that the 
camera is simple (just a light tight tube), and there's no electro-wundercam 
making decisions for you. Rather than blast off exposures with a motor drive, you 
*slow down* and make the decisions yourself.

But the flip side is that detailed recordkeeping can get in the way just as much as
a modern super-camera - and that paradoxically, sometimes to 'slow down' and
be more contemplative, you need to 'speed up' by paring back the process until
you get a sort of 'flow' that lets you respond intuitively and easily to what
you're experiencing visually.  If the process is cumbersome, it creates a barrier
to responding photographically because 'yes, it's a nice scene but it's just not
worth the bother to set up the tripod, unlimber the camera, etc.' and so you
don't make that exposure at all.

So I don't think I'll be using a digital camera to preview possible images, nor will
I be using a PDA.  I'll use a very small digicam to take 'visual notes' for planning
future trips, yes.  But there's no way I'm going to record the meter reading
and zone placement every single time I raise the meter to my eye.  By the time
you've written it all down, the sun has moved and the clouds have moved and
that shaft of light falling on the leaves of that tree are gone.  

"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all your piety nor wit 
shall call it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash a word out of it."
Photography (even large format photography) that is based on the expectation that
the world will hold still for 25 minutes while we get our act together is not going
to be the best photography you can do.

I wouldn't advocate that everyone take it to the extreme that I have, but I do
think it's worth considering that more detailed record keeping and a more
finicky process are not neccessarily a Good Thing.

-Paul
http://www.butzi.net