Leakyseal - that woman is Sally Mann - and she truly walks on water. She’s extremely well regarded in fine art and photographic circles for her large format “wet plate” photography, which is a bit archaic and utilizes sensitized collodion-coated glass plates as negatives. The tricky part is that once the plate is coated, both the exposure and processing need to occur while the plate is still wet. I believe that Sally uses camera/plate sizes in the range from 8x10 up to 16x20 inches.
I sat across from Sally at a dinner table in 1987… at what was then known as the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine. I’d been learning to coat papers with platinum, palladium, and albumen emulsions from a guy named Rob Steinberg, and Sally was leading another group with her process. Had some interesting conversation that evening!
The wet plate process has been around awhile…since the latter half of the 19th century, with one of the better know wet-plate practitioners of those days being William Henry Jackson - who, with all of his gear (including dark-tent, 20x24 camera, wet plate chemistry, and one would assume his lunch), ventured out into the wilderness, and when he arrived at a location with a good vantage point, he’d set up his camera and get the focus correct, then set up his dark tent, coat a glass plate and load it into a film holder to make it light safe, after which he would load the holder into his pre-focussed camera, make the exposure and rush back to process it. After making a series of these negatives, he’d travel back to his photo lab and make contact prints of his images, using the processed glass plates (at least the ones that didn’t break!
At any rate…Willam Henry Jackson was commissioned to photograph many of what are now our national parks - and in fact his imagery provided the basis for their establishment and preservation. I’ve seen some of these images, and they are, to this day, stunning!
A930Rocket - those twistys are all about image control, although I’d rarely use this camera in the configuration shown in the photo (the true purpose of which is to give a potential buyer some idea of the cameras available movements), I do indeed make use of one or more of the four specific movements which were combined to create this photo, namely: tilts and swings of either the lens or the film plane (or both), and vertical and/or horizontal lateral shifts of the lens and/or film plane.
At any rate, tilts and swings are used when one wishes to adjust the available plane of focus. In the photo below, for example (Stovepipe Wells Dunes, Death Valley), the immediate foreground is but a few feet from my position, while the distant dunes stretch out over several miles - which poses a bit of a challenge in terms of getting all of this into focus, and while I might come close by merely stopping my lens down to a tiny aperture to gain depth of field, this will often compromise overall sharpness by introducing aperture-induced diffraction. A better option here is to tilt either the lens forward on its axis, or the film plane rearward, or some combination of both - to a point at which the plane of focus will become more or less aligned with the “object plane” of the vast desert stretching out before me:
Edit: this file does not look sharp to me (the one on the earlier photo-thread looks better). But trust me, this image is sharp!
The lateral shifts are used to move about the available image area while leaving the image plane itself alone. A good example of a lateral shift would be if one were photographing a building, straight-on, which might otherwise require the camera to be tilted upwards, which can create some perspective distortion, in which the sides of the building tilt in towards each other. But with a camera employing shifts, one can keep both lens and film planes parallel to each other and to the building, while the lens itself is shifted upwards until the top of the building becomes visible on the focussing screen, without altering the planar relationships already established.
At any rate, such shifts tend to be utilized more by folks photographing architectural subjects, while swings and tilts tend to be used by landscape folks like myself. Hope this helps!