Legendary landscape photographer Clyde Butcher is well known for his absolutely beautiful landscapes. So to understand how his creative mind works, he featured a video on how he goes about using his large format camera and developing in the darkroom. While most people that dabble in analog tend to go for 35mm or 120 film, shooting large format is another story that’s an even more painstaking process overall.
Clyde starts off by telling us about his camera and film. Indeed, he uses the same film that any ordinary 35mm camera will use, but bigger of course. Due to their being more emulsion on the surfaces, the images also tend to come out looking better.
What you also get is his process when it comes to printing the photo onto a piece of paper using an enlarger. Clyde talks about how sometimes it takes a day or two or him to get a photo just the way he wants it through the enlargement process. The reason: sometimes he has to do a lot of burning and dodging to do his prints. This is how things were done before Photoshop and are arguably done even now in the darkroom with photographers still using large format and analog film.
If you’re interested in learning more about Clyde Butcher and how he works, you should check out our interview with him at our premium publication, La Noir Image. Subscriptions start as low as $15/year.