4x5 portraits

[markbarendt]

Welcome, fun stuff there.

[rich815]

Really nice portraits!

[gus.]

*apologies for resurrecting an old thread*

Hey folks, I'm not very familiar with medium format gear. In the photo of the girl with the glasses I'm having trouble understanding the focal point. It's her eyes, sure, but then her shoulder is out of focus yet her lower sweater remains focused. How does that work?

[polyglot]

Her eyes are well forward of her shoulder; she may even be doing the turtle move (to prevent double-chins; I try to do it in every frontal portrait I'm in). Shoulders are probably a good 7 to 10cm behind the eyes, so well out of focus. Arms come forward a bit and back into the plane of focus.

Secondly, these are 4x5 portraits (not medium format), which means they were probably shot with a view camera. Such things allow you to control the plane of focus by tilting the lens, which allows (for example) a photo with the eyes in focus but everything else (below the nose and above the fringe) dramatically blurred. Not the case here, but it's an option.

[MattKing]

*apologies for resurrecting an old thread*

Hey folks, I'm not very familiar with medium format gear. In the photo of the girl with the glasses I'm having trouble understanding the focal point. It's her eyes, sure, but then her shoulder is out of focus yet her lower sweater remains focused. How does that work?

Her eyes are essentially the same distance from the camera as the lower part of her sweater.

Her shoulder is farther from the camera, so it is out of focus.

The only role played by the film format is that medium or large format will have less inherent depth of field then 35mm or smaller formats, because the lenses used for the larger formats need to have longer focal lengths to achieve the same field of view from the same camera position.

EDIT: oops, as polyglot mentioned ahead of me, as these are 4x5 portraits there may also be some camera movements involved