A Year on the East Hill: Equipment choices

Does it matter?

East Hill, Hastings, June 2024. Ian Land

I’m shooting this project with two cameras, a Mamiya 645, which uses 120 roll film, is lightweight by medium format standards and is relatively affordable to use (15 pictures on a roll of film, around 50p per picture); and a Chamonix 10 x 8 field camera, which is now absurdly expensive to shoot with (at the moment a box of 25 sheets of 10 x 8 Ilford FP4+ film is around £200, so about £8 per photograph, not including chemistry and paper for developing and printing the results), and is very heavy and inconvenient to hike with.

Every serious photographer I know is associated with particular cameras and formats and has strong preferences when it comes to choosing equipment. In theory it shouldn’t matter all that much, surely? “The best camera is the one you have with you”, “It’s all about the photographer’s eye, not the camera they use”. These are commonplace notions. On one level they are entirely sensible, as it’s possible to make good and interesting work with almost any camera, or even with a camera phone. But on another they are simply wrong, commonsensical as they seem.

Photographers think about their gear choices all the time, because different equipment renders the same image differently, and every photographer worth her salt has strong preferences for a particular style or styles of rendering. And this is true even if the photographer generally seems indifferent to their equipment choices (never believe a photographer who pretends they don’t care about this stuff).

Photography is an art, but it's an art that is instantiated through technology, and different technologies produce different results. In the case of large format, the entire process is completely different from the norm of contemporary photography - absolutely requiring a tripod, and lots of time to both set up a picture, and then to decide whether or not to even take it, and how to take it (large format view cameras have extensive lens and film plane movements, which give lots of compositional choices not available with smaller cameras). It forces slow motion, a deep immersion in the moment (an intensity of seeing, although that probably sounds pretentious), pre-visualisation (you can’t keep taking the camera out and looking through the ground glass every time you see something that might be worth photographing). It requires patience, technical knowledge, and the willingness to carry heavy loads over long distances. The result is a huge negative containing masses of fine detail, which can potentially be printed at enormous sizes with no loss of quality, or contact printed to make beautiful, jewel-like prints that are of a size that they can be seen clearly. There is no other experience in photography quite like it.

I have around 50 sheets of 10 x 8 film remaining in my supplies. I suspect this project will be the last opportunity I get to shoot this format, both for cost and age reasons (the camera isn’t getting any lighter, and that is becoming a problem as I get older). So, partly, this project is likely a farewell to 10 x 8. If by the end of it I have 20 or so really good 10 x 8 negatives I will be completely satisfied that it was worthwhile. And there’s always 5 x 7, a format which is much more practical, with somewhat smaller and lighter cameras, and much more affordable film.