VIEW CAMERA

My goal for this semester, amongst many other things, is to learn and master the usage of the View Camera. Why? Well, although the view camera was developed around the same time as the Daguerreotype, its still used today to control not only focus but onvergence of parallel lines. Because of this, the view camera is an ideal tool for architectural photography, because it has a grid on the ground glass, so when youre looking through the camera you can use the parallel lines to line up with whatever to create the perfect photo. I became interested in using the view camera after a photo series i started , and am still working on inspired by nostalgic landscapes. The series is also about the idea of an over abundance of vacancy and emptiness in a world that seems so built-up and over run by people and industries. It seems that people take a place and build it up to better accommodate themselves and then just abandon it. This was the first photo of the series:

Back to the View Camera, I wanted to the horizon line to be a dominant factor in all the photos. Symmetry is also a factor i am thinking about, keeping the photos simple and symmetrical, with no extra content i want to achieve a sort of horizontal flatness of plane, similar to a Rothko painting. The view camera would be perfect for achieving this kind of perfect symmetry.