Last August, we wrote about how renowned photojournalist David Burnett was spotted using a large format camera at the London Olympics. If you've been wondering how the photographs turned out, today's your lucky day.
Here's an inside look at how Burnett's project came to be, and the beautiful images that resulted.
For his project titled Take Refuge, Los Angeles-based photographer Kevin Cooley shot nighttime landscape photographs with an interesting choice of lighting: military-grade flares -- the kind you find in emergency kits. Each image in the series features the same red glow, whether the flare is held in a subject's hand or hidden behind a feature in the landscape.
London-based photographer Tony Ellwood has a project called In No Time that deals with our perception and awareness of our passage of time. All the photographs are of the same pier on a beach that Ellwood visited over a period of six months. His technique, which took him 18 months to develop and perfect, involves visiting the location multiple times for each photo -- sometimes up to three times a day for multiple days. Using a 4x5 large format camera, Ellwood creates each exposure across multiple sessions, as if he were doing multiple exposure photography, but of a single subject and scene. Each exposure time ranges from a few seconds to multiple hours.
If you were given the task of shooting gymnastics at the Olympics, what camera would you use? The Canon EOS-1D X for its 14fps capabilities?
At least one Olympic sports photographer chose something much slower, much larger, and much older.
The subjects in portrait projects are often selected for something they all have in common. The people seen in Brooklyn-based photographer Caroll Taveras' project You Are Here have this in common: they were lost at the Olympics. Commissioned by Mother London, Taveras finds tourists at the Olympic games who are hopelessly lost, and then guides them to their desired destinations in exchange for a portrait.
Los Angeles Times Jay L. Clendenin spent four weeks leading up to the Olympics traveling around Souther California, making portraits of athletes on the US Olympic Team. While he certainly wasn't the only one shooting the athletes, Clendenin chose an interesting way of capturing them: in addition to using Canon 5D Mark IIs for digital photos, he also used a 4x5-inch field camera and a 100+-year-old Petzval lens. When displayed side-by-side, the photos show an interesting contrast between "old" and "new".
This “How It’s Made” segment provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the manufacturing process for modern Walker Titan SF 4×5 …
London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4x5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent any light from spilling onto the sensor. Light from the Schneider Kreuznach Xenar 4.5/150mm lens entered straight into the open mirror box of the DSLR without any physical link between the two cameras. Wilman was surprised to discovered that this pairing produced quite a respectable macro setup.
If you’ve never shot with a large format camera before, you might find this video illuminating. In it, photographer …
For his project "Day Into Night", photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4x5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night.
Photographer Cary Norton built a working 4x5 large format camera using Lego bricks, a 127mm lens he purchased for $40 on eBay, and a film holder and ground glass in the back.