New Way to Imitate Large Format Camera

by admin

Yesterday I received a new DVD of Lenswork Extended in the mail and it sparked a new idea about how to get more out of my digital SLR and turn it into a large format camera. Issue #87 features portfolio of architecture photography by Scott Hendershot. I have not yet listened to the interview recorded on the DVD, but I did take a look through his portfolio and also through his web-site. I was left both impressed and excited about the new way of shooting I am going to try in the next few weeks.

The portfolio that Scott presents in the issue of Lenswork has been shot over a span of 20+ years, but it’s hard to tell the difference between the shots taken with large format cameras back in the day, and with digital cameras of today. The reason for that is that when the new digital era came along, Scott decided to embrace it, but he wanted his style and the quality of his work to stay the same. Today’s digital cameras do not have the same dynamic range as medium and large format cameras, nor resolution.

What Scott does to compensate for that are two things that I found interesting – (1) he takes as much information as he can for the scene by bracketing his exposures three times, (2) he takes 9 pictures of the same scene to expand the resolution of the final image. In other words, he takes 27 shots of one scene, and then blends the exposures to expand the dynamic range, and also creates a composite panorama photo that rivals the resolution of a large format camera.

I took a similar approach to one shot when I was in Yosemite last week, where I took 17 shots of the same scene and then created a composite that turned out to be 96 megapixels wide. I’ll post my results later this week. What I’ve learned with that experiment  is that with higher resolution, the quality of the image increases overall, no matter what size we’re looking at. The more detail camera captures, the sharper the photo is to begin with.

This approach to photography only works with still subjects, and I have no desire to try it on a beach when taking a picture of moving waves and clouds. This approach will also never work on my 2 year old, who can’t sit still for a single frame, let alone 27.  But when it comes to architecture and still life – I think this method is worth experimenting with, and I’ll do some more testing in the future.

To see more work by Scott, click here. He also has an article on that technique here.