Essential Tripod: This trick is never as satisfactory as getting the picture the way you (or your clients) want it on the negative, once and for all, at the time of shooting.Besides, the view Camera has other advantages which are than 4 x 5. I have shot thousands of pictures with an 8 x 10, and I can tell you that wrestling the dead weight of Camera and tripod makes every job fall into the category of hard labor. Also important is that the cost of everything, camera, holders, tripod, lenses and film, goes up when you go into 8 x 10.
To photographers who were accustomed to studying the full-size image on the ground glass of their tripod cameras before exposing the plate, the typical hand Camera finder was inadequate and lacked the precision they found essential to artistic success. Furthermore these photographers were not satisfied with focusing by merely estimating the lens-subject distance or by relying on depth-of-field tables. They wanted to see the image the way the Camera saw it before making the exposure.
He exposed the plate, while wet, in the camera. It was then developed in pyrogallic acid, fixed in hypo, washed, and dried. All these operations had to be done rapidly, before the collodion dried and became impervious to the processing solutions.2 Thus the photographer could not be too far from a darkroom. In the field he had to bring along some kind of darkroom-usually a wagon or a tent, chemicals and processing equipment- the camera, plate holders, as well as the essential tripod, for the exposure times were too long to permit the Camera to be hand-held.
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Photography
