The New York Times ran a piece about a pho­tog­ra­pher who built a big cam­era. I can’t stand this kind of writ­ing. Because the author is so tech­ni­cally unaquainted with the sub­ject, the aver­age reader would come to the con­clu­sion that the sub­ject is a genius or a mad sci­en­tist for cre­at­ing images that “con­tain 100 times as much data as the aver­age pro­fes­sional dig­i­tal cam­era.” To make mat­ters worse, the writer drops the name of San­dia National Labs with the impli­ca­tion that they’re study­ing him.

Well guess what. This guy built a really cool cam­era out of spare Cold War-era parts. That it pro­duces images that are unbe­liev­ably sharp is per­fectly believ­able: he uses 9×18″ sheet film with vac­uum hold-down. There is no magic to build­ing a view cam­era. The big­ger, the bet­ter, and this one is just ridicu­lously big.

Using the same met­ric, the pic­tures that Ansel Adams took 70 years ago (on 8×10″ film) con­tain 50 times more infor­ma­tion than today’s dig­i­tal cam­era. Can we learn any­thing from this? No. It’s an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of pho­tog­ra­phy, altogether.

(It’s an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of photography.)