Tilt and Shift -

Archived Article - March 2003

Paul Gallagher Landscape photographer and Paul McMullin Architectural

When I began photography I firstly became obsessed with the black and white images of past masters such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. I loved the overwhelming quality, the tonal range in their images and the high detail and definition. I began to study photography at the age of 16 and was employed professionally at the tender age of 18. During my days as a student I used the wonderful Olympus OM20 and exposed the slowest black and white films I could get my hands on, such as Ilford’s Pan F and the classic Kodak Technical Pan. I used these films was because I was desperately trying to emulate the tonality and definition the masters and with such a small-format camera and exposing onto a small area of film, grain was a big problem. Although these films offered some of the qualities I sought, they did not satisfy me enough and having exhausted all the 35mm film options I realised that I had to make a change of camera format. I then made the drastic decision to sell my original set of Beatles' autographs and use the money for my move to medium format, which involved me buying the ‘house-brick style’ camera, the Mamiya RB67. Although largely regarded as a studio camera and still very popular to this day, it was a move in the right direction. Because of the larger format, I was able to load Ilford Delta 100 film (which is still my film of choice today) and secure the detail of the larger format. The benefits of lugging this monster camera around were evident on my first return to the darkroom. After processing the films I made contact prints and the tonal quality and detail was astounding, resulting in this camera becoming my workhorse for about 10 years.

Further along my career path I hit another stumbling block, which was actually a boulder! As many a landscape photographer would say, 'I was in the right location on a remote Scottish beach and the light was truly perfect'. I set up the camera on the tripod, made a meter reading and then stopped the lens down to f32 for full depth of field. After I had processed the films I began seeking this individual frame as it was this one I desperately wanted to see. The results left me livid! Although I had stopped the lens right down, this was not enough and the foreground of the frame was soft. At the time I was lecturing in photography at Southport College and one of my fellow lecturers said, 'Paul, if you want the same depth of field as Adams, buy a large format camera and use the movements. In particular get to grips with lens tilt.' The phenomenon of lens tilt is what makes many of the classic landscape images look as though you can touch the grass or rocks in the foreground and is known as the Scheimpflug Principle. The principle is named after Austrian army captain, Theodor Scheimpflug, who used it to devise a systematic method for correcting perspective distortion in aerial photographs. The principle works by taking into account that when the lens and image planes are parallel, the depth of field extends between parallel planes on either side of the plane of focus. When the Scheimpflug principle is employed, ie the lens is tilted, the depth of field becomes ‘wedge shaped’ and therefore the plane of focus is ‘stretched’, delivering stunning details throughout the image from front to back.

The move to large format was always something I had considered and I was often tempted after experiencing the huge leap in quality from 35mm to 6x7cm. The truth is that this was a very big leap. Although 5x4 gear was easily available, it posed two major problems for me. They were, having to buy all the associated equipment, dark-slides, focusing cloth, and focusing loupe, but even more concerning was the processing equipment such as tanks, a new enlarger and lens! I did see sense, bit the bullet and acquired the wonderfully-engineered Walker Titan XL and later the Ebony 45SU. With these cameras I settled into a system, a fastidious routine in which everything was controlled by me and my work improved – I was achieving the standards I had always aimed for.

At this stage I was working almost entirely in film but the digital world was leaping forward and I was eventually tempted to move out of the darkroom for my print production and move into the office – by scanning my negatives and printing on Epson large-format printers. This process of large-format camera movements, hand processing films and scanning the negatives for digital output is a great way to work and I have never had detail problems or depth of field issues since.

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