Welcome to fourbyfivephotography.com. My name is Lucas and I do four by five photography. What is four by five photography? To put it succintly, it is photography with the use of 4x5 film (4 inches x 5 inches in dimension) or in other words film with a surface area some 13x greater than that of your standard 35mm film. What does that mean in practical terms?
More Surface Area = More Detail
Here is an example of this in practice:
The image to the left has been taken with 4x5 film. It was taken on Vancouver Island, one of my favourite places in Canada, and is a busy shot full of ferns and the like.
The image to the right is a small detail of this 4x5 photograph. I'll let the results speak for themselves.
Four by five photography is the smallest aspect of the large format photographical branch. Other aspects include 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, and even larger photographical formats. This website does not go into these aspects of large format photography. If you are curious about why people would go to such insane lengths to lug around those huge (believe me they are HUGE) cameras to accomodate these formats, you must go here.
But even so, a 4x5 camera is still rather bulky to be lugging around. So why do I do it? The high detail in these shots are only part of the reason. After all, you can go and buy a Canon EOS 20D for not that much and get decently high resolution images. The main reason I do it is because of the methodology of it.
To illustrate, let me introduce Dslr user 'Dan' and the 4x5 camera user 'Bob' (these are totally made up irrelevent names by the way). Dan and Bob are good friends and they are taking a hike in the scenic Rockies (in Canada) to enjoy and photograph nature. As they walk, Dan takes hundreds of pictures; pictures of birds, trees, puddles, Bob, meadows, and of course mountains. Meanwhile Bob just savours the atmosphere and upon seeing something, spends the next 10 minutes patiently setting up, framing, waiting for that cloud to move, and taking a single shot. By the end of the day, Dan has approximately 1000 images with 25 'keepers', a pretty succesful day. Conversely, Bob has taken only 10 pictures and he doesn't even know how many are 'keepers' yet as he hasn't developed them yet. A few days later, however, Bob develops his pictures and lo and behold, 3 are 'keepers'. Now who had the more succesful day? Dan with his 25 'keepers' or Bob with his 3 'keepers'? I'll let you decide.
What now? You can view my galleries.