OK, so this was taken with the Toyo-Field 4x5.
A close inspection will reveal the limited depth of field. I focused on the trees, and they’re sharp enough, but the far forest is not. It’s interesting, and just a little ironic, that a lot of the commentary on photo blogs today concerns the concept of "bokeh," that is, the out-of-focus areas in a photograph. Its quality, how to get it, and so forth. Ironic because we had to go through hoops in the past in order to get even acceptable depth of field, but now the complaint is that most of the smaller digital cameras have too much depth of field.
Also, there were some sunlit patches that were coming out as completely white—"blown highlights" in today’s lingo. I dealt with this by using the cloning tool in Photoshop, but of course I wouldn’t have been able to effect a similar fix using an enlarger.
Going through my contact sheets, it’s a little dismaying to see how few of my old 4x5’s are satisfactory. I think now that I must have had trouble getting good compositions due to the limitations of viewing the subject through the camera’s glass back—everything was shown upside-down and reversed under an unwieldy black cloth.
Photo: Forest—Yosemite, 1997
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