Yeah, I've seen those backs. You'd probably have to make quite a few captures and do a lot of stitching to get anything useful, but they probably work fine. Part of the appeal of large format is the large capture area and the optical relationships (dof, etc) that implies, so I don't think you'd really be able to use satisfactorily it without doing multi-image stitching. At the very least you'd have to do it to preserve reasonable fields of view. For example, the widest lenses on 4x5 are ~65mm lenses (ultrawide field of view, very expensive), but more common are 90mm to 120mm (about the same as 17mm on a small format DSLR or 28mm fullframe); obviously you'd have to stitch or you'd be getting short to medium telephoto fields of view with these 'wide angle' lenses.
Don't discount large format film just because it's film though; if you are a competent (and perhaps patient) photographer and don't mind shooting lower quantities it's an absolutely fantastic way to shoot. You can develop B&W in lightproof cannisters at home and send colour transparencies out (mail order or a local lab) or develop yourself. Then add a scanner for a couple of hundred bucks and you've got a 200 megapixel hybrid digital capture system.
The photographic process itself is actually pretty rewarding too - at least for me. I'm no longer really that interested in coming home with 500 images (even good ones) on a compact flash card - it's just too much crap to wade through. I find 4x5 much more fulfilling; photography has turned from an exercise in squinting through a viewfinder to an observational process where I'm wandering and exploring photographic opportunities without even pulling my camera out of the bag until I've found the shot I want - and then I get to set it up on a big ground glass under the dark cloth. 4x5 is really nice and pretty practical, 8x10 is amazing but bulkier and expensive (the advantage, besides the amazingly shallow DOF you can get, are 8x10 alt. process contact prints).
The movements are the icing on the cake. No PC lens can get anywhere near the flexibility of a proper view camera.
If you'd like to be talked into it, the guys on
Large Format Photography Forum are just the guys to do it. Secondarly, apug.org is very useful (though there's a small, but vocal hard core of fanatical anti-digital users there that you've got to watch out for
).
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Originally Posted by lightup
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