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Cameras, Formats & Systems

View Camera

A large-format camera consisting of a lens board and film back joined by a flexible bellows, both adjustable in position and angle.

In depth

The bellows allows movements — rise, fall, shift, swing and tilt — that give complete control over perspective and the plane of focus. The image on the ground glass is inverted and reversed, and each sheet of film is loaded individually, so the process is deliberate by necessity. Everything a tilt-shift lens does is a limited imitation of what a view camera does natively.

Examples in practice

Photographing a tall building, front rise keeps the verticals parallel without tilting the camera upward at all.