View Camera - Types of View Camera

Types of View Camera

There are several types of view camera for different purposes and allowing different degrees of movement and portability. They include:

• Monorail camera - This is the most common type of studio view camera, with the front and rear standards being mounted to a single rail that is fixed to a camera support. This design allows the greatest range of movements and flexibility, with both front and rear standards able to tilt, shift, rise, fall and swing in similar proportion. These are generally made of metal with leather or synthetic bellows, and are difficult to pack for travel. Sinar and Toyo are popular manufacturers of monorail view camera systems. ARCA-Swiss produces monorail cameras for field use in addition to models for the more conventional studio applications. Many manufacturers also offer monorail extensions, which permit the front or rear standards to move further away from each other, allowing for focus on very close objects (macrophotography).
• Field camera - These have the front and rear standard mounted on sliding rails fixed to a hinged flat bed that is fixed to a camera support (tripod, etc.). These cameras are usually made of wood, or sometimes lightweight and strong composites such as carbon fiber. When the bellows are fully retracted the flat bed can be folded up, reducing the camera to a relatively small, light, and portable box. The price for this portability is that the standards are not as mobile or as adjustable as those of a monorail design; the rear standard, in particular, may be fixed and offer no movement. These large format but transportable cameras are popular with landscape photographers. Tachihara and Wisner are examples of modern field cameras at opposite ends of the price scale.
  • Extremely large field cameras using 11×14 film and larger, or panoramic film sizes such as 4×10 or 8×20, are sometimes referred to as banquet cameras, and were used to photograph large, posed groups of people to mark an occasion, such as a banquet or a wedding.
  • Studio and salon cameras are similar to field cameras, but do not fold up for portability.
  • Before the introduction of rollfilm, folding plate cameras with limited movements as described here were often used; an example is the Goerz Taro-Tenax 9x12cm.
• Press and technical cameras are true view cameras, as almost all of them have a ground glass integral to the film-holder mechanism that allows critical focus and full use of the sometimes limited movements. More expensive examples had a wide array of movements, as well as focusing and compositing aids like rangefinders and viewfinders. They are most often made of metal, designed to fold up quickly for portability, used by press photographers before and during the second world war.
• A more modern development is the highly portable Sinar arTec view camera which fails to fit within any of the above criteria and was designed primarily to be used by architectural photographers. It has the novel ability to take panoramic stitched images by means of built in step and repeat mechanism.

View cameras use large format sheet film, using one sheet per photograph. Standard sizes in inches are: 4×5, 5×7, 4×10, 5×12, 8×10, 11×14, 7×17, 8×20, 12×20, and 20×24. (It is usual to list the short side first in the Americas, and the long side in many other countries, thus 4×5 is the same as 5×4). A similar, but not identical, range of metric sizes is used in many countries; thus 9×12 cm is similar to, but not interchangeable with, 4×5 inches. The most widely used format is 4×5, followed by 8×10.

A few rollfilm cameras have movements that make them as versatile as a sheet film view camera. Rollfilm and instant film backs are available to use in place of a sheetfilm holder on a single-film camera.