Landscape Evaluation

I always thought of landscape as beautiful scenery, this assignment had definitely given me a new insight into the 'here and now' landscape and before I went out I did research the subject more which helped me to understand the concept better.

I was really nervous about using the 5x4 camera and especially using it outside with people watching and my first attempt was a disaster as I loaded the film the wrong way and it also didn't help looking through the viewfinder to see the picture upside down and back to front, framing and focusing was also awkward.

Second attempt - was very careful and felt more comfortable with loading the film and the settings on the camera and it was a relief to finally manage some prints, even though they were quite dull.

Third attempt - I was comfortable using the camera, loading the film and framing the subject and finally felt confident with what I was doing so I took the wide angle lens to try and get some good street shots.

I did leave printing till late but did spend more time on trying to improve the contrast in the photos.  I am more pleased with the black and white printing this time as I feel that the photos have good contrast in them and I can see the difference in the normal paper we used last time and also the warm tone paper we used for this assignment.

The only criticism is that the more I look at the photos the more imperfections I can see which is probably due to the negatives having something on them which is not visible to the naked eye!

I also took landscape photos on my compact digital camera and also on my DSLR, some of them were the same shots to compare the settings and the results to a 5x4 camera and also to see what the image would look like in black and white.  I must admit I  did find the digital cameras much more easier to use especially with a digital zoom and being able to see the photo the right way round as the framing was more awkward on the 5x4 camera with the image being upside down and back to front.  Framing is easier on a digital camera and settings can be adjusted easily and quickly, it took much longer to frame a shot with the 5x4 camera and manually adjusting the zoom and fine focusing again is time consuming.

I also made the mistake of leaving the light meter at home the first time and it was really awkward trying to guess the settings and not having a digital screen to be able to preview the shot and hope for the best until the film was processed.

As a 5x4 film camera has a much larger imaging area, it is therefore able to capture much more details than a digital camera resulting in better quality photographs and again this was evident in the photographs that I took as my first shot of a building was really clear showing minute details brick by brick.

Overall I am very impressed with the 5x4 camera and the quality of the photographs and it does reinforce setting everything on the camera manually and paying attention to detail to get the perfect result but on the downside, the camera is quite big and not very practical and photographs certainly cant be taken in a hurry.

above: taken with DSLR to compare with 5x4 camera