A view camera is a large-format camera consisting of a lens mounted on a movable front standard, a film holder on a movable rear standard, and a flexible bellows connecting the two. The design provides extensive front and rear movements, including rise, fall, shift, tilt, and swing, which give the photographer optical control unmatched by any fixed-body camera. View cameras work primarily on 4×5 inch and 8×10 inch sheet film, with some specialized formats reaching 11×14 inches and beyond.
The view camera was the dominant tool of serious landscape, architectural, and studio photography from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Ansel Adams worked in 4×5 and 8×10 throughout his life. Edward Weston photographed peppers and dunes with his 8×10. The vast majority of mid-century architectural and commercial photography passed through view cameras because no other tool could control perspective and focus plane the way a view camera could.
Movements operate on the same Scheimpflug principles that govern tilt-shift lenses, but with vastly more range and independent control of both the front and rear standards. Tilting the lens plane changes focus distribution, useful for getting a tabletop or a road in focus from front to back. Tilting the film plane changes the rendered shape, useful for correcting or exaggerating perspective. Shifting the lens corrects converging verticals on tall buildings without tilting the entire camera up.
Composition on a view camera is done on a ground glass at the back of the camera, viewed under a dark cloth that blocks ambient light. The image projected on the ground glass is upside down and reversed left to right, which takes practice to read fluently. A spot meter is used to measure specific tones in the scene, and exposures are placed on the zone system grid that Adams and Fred Archer formalized. Each sheet is loaded into a separate film holder, exposed, and developed individually, often with custom development times to control contrast.
Despite their age, view cameras remain in production. Linhof in Germany builds the Master Technika and Technikardan. Chamonix in China makes folding wooden field cameras prized for their light weight and precision. Ebony, before the company closed, made some of the most beautiful field cameras ever produced. Toyo, Wista, Cambo, Sinar, and Arca-Swiss serve studio and field photographers respectively. Digital backs from Phase One can be adapted to many of these bodies, combining view-camera movements with contemporary digital capture.
Working with a view camera is deliberately slow. Setting up, leveling, framing, focusing, applying movements, metering, loading the holder, removing the dark slide, firing, and replacing the slide can easily take twenty minutes per exposure. The discipline imposed by this pace is itself part of the appeal for many practitioners, who find that the deliberation produces better photographs than the rapid burst work that fast digital cameras encourage.