You press the button, we do the rest.

Back in the day large format photography for me was not so much about quality, it was more about the slowness of it and having to think about what you wanted to achieve. The high cost of film (even higher now of course) always made me question if an image was really worth it, which became something of an editing process. With everything in large format needing adjustment, and the time spent setting up, the whole process was a complete arse. But arse’s aside, it made you think about what you were doing throughout the process of making an image. There was certainly no, sorting it out in later in photoshop. After lugging around a big heavy camera mounted on an even heavier tripod and making a single image, there would be the debacle of getting the film processed. And then there was the printing, an art in itself. Often it would be weeks before the final image was realized, and even then it still might be crap. Working with large format film, Ansel Adams theory of producing 12 good images a year made perfect sense back then.

Today cameras are small plastic things and the tripod almost redundant thanks to ISO settings so high you can photograph bullets. You can make as many images as you like for free before messing around with them and showing your friends who will look at them for less than a second.

Over time, photography has always been sold on making things easy, but in doing so technology has automated the thought process. In 1888 George Eastman’s advertising slogan for Kodak stated; “You press the button, we do the rest.” The technology may have changed, but the idea remains..