I'm crawling out of the advertising woodwork to add my bit on LF photography. There was another side to LF. Forget Yellowstone, great names and cherry-wood. In the beginning there was the process printer. He had to take your transparency, mask it, shoot the separations, mask again (in register) and contact print the plates. Better 8x10 than 6x6. So advertising campaigns were shot on 8x10
In the sixties, where I began, the ad agencies, JWT, McCann, Y&R, Ogilvy and others bought their way into Europe. Food and soap powder which previously was sold out of the sack by weight was starting to be sold in boxes with brand names. Ok, I am generalising, but here goes. The agencies came in with english-speaking Creative Directors who liked things done the way things were done in NY and London. Things were done on 8x10. It kind of separated the men from the boys.
The agencies had another reason for requiring 8x10 - the all-important Client Presentation. Again, forget definition, tonal range, art. The transparency was mounted in a large black passpartout and held up to the window by an Account Executive. It had prestige. Anything smaller than 8x10 couldn't make it. Sometimes the trannies were sent off to London to make dye-transfers for retouching and more was spent on post-production than on the shoot.
An Art Director wouldn't look at your portfolio if it wasn't in 8x10. When he did look, he held the trannies up to the window too. (ADs did use a light box; after the shoot, with a loupe, for nit-picking) In forty years I never got to shoot a colour negative. The system started to colapse in the eighties when Art Kane turned up with 35mm kodachromes.
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4x5 was for pack-shots, the products at the bottom of the page next to the body-copy. Product Managers would grumble at the small size and produce a loupe to check the label (yes, they carried a loupe to presentations).
Then there was 5x7, 13x18cm over here. It was like there was some sort of class prejudice. 13x18 was for commercial photography, furniture, kitchen catalogs. They shot negative colour film and sold prints for salesman portfolios. 8x10 and 4x5 was ok, 13x18 was not ok. We would have been a bit ashamed to bring a 13x18 into an agency.
Things change and I grew up. I tried a Technika 13x18 in 1982 and thought what the hell and never looked back. For the next two decades I made a career out of 13x18, doing traditional still-life - my way, orthogonal and all in focus. The format is a perfect match for table-top. 13x18 got me a couple of Art Directors Club golds and a Clio. I didn't need more than limited movement and an 180mm lens. Also - no polaroid, no problem. The Linhof was too heavy to carry around outdoors so I build a half-plate box for landscape. See it here: http://web.mac.com/cjbroadbent/Site/fivebyseven.html
My humble advice to first-time large-formatters is - You don't need big contortions. You do need to be sure the front end is square on. (Have a look at a 'Non Folding Field Camera'). Use just one lens, no longer than the width of the film. Get the back-end plumb square, raise and drop the front at will, but tilt it hardly at all. Scheimpflug is for the birds.
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