I've been meaning to play around with the movements of my LF view camera ever since I got it, but never really had the time. Whilst on holiday recently I found some time (never enough) to start having a considered go with some tilt/shift. I had a load of fun and learned a lot, but it was all still very rushed. On top of that the sun rotated between non-existent and super bright every couple of minutes and there was also a really strong wind, so it was a bit of a crap shoot and I ended up just guessing exposure times to speed things along (keepin' it 'ballpark'
).
The very simple plan I was trying to achieve was to keep the top of the photo nice and sharp and blur out the bottom in an artistic way. However I had to keep stopping up to counter the combination of bright sunlight and my slow lens, so most of the blur that I composed with through the ground glass at f4,5 was long gone by the time I took the shot at f22 :-( The result is a pretty straight snap of a chapel with a very slightly blurred bottom 3rd. Might have been better off keeping it sharp throughout.
Just as I was about to get demoralized I remembered I had a polarizer for my 35mm SLR in my other camera bag. It was good for 3 stops which meant I could finally open up to f4,5 if I waited long enough for the sun to go behind a cloud. I could get the blur I'd been composing with. Great news...until the film slipped as I pulled it through the rollers. This skewed the picture by a few degrees, gave me a bonfire bottom left and chopped the top of the 'spire' off the chapel.
It was also high time I headed off to join the rest of the family. So close, but no cigar
Both taken on my Tachihara 5x4 with Fujifilm FP-100C45, but scanned as black and white because they didn't have enough punch in colour.
