If you’re just getting into film photography or just starting to look into large format photography you may be wondering why so many people love 4x5 cameras and what the advantages are to using them. Well there are several:

Larger Print Size/Better Print Quality
This first one may seem pretty obvious but it is huge. It would take about a dozen 35 mm negatives laying side by side to cover up the negative produced by a 4x5 view camera. That means (in theory and all things being equal) that if you can get a great looking 8x10 print out of your 35 mm negative you should be able to get a print just as sharp from your 4x5 negative that’s 30 by 40 inches. Of course there are artists that make sharp prints even larger than that with these cameras.

The Use Of Smaller Apertures
Smaller (larger number) aperture sizes can be used when photographing with 4x5 film cameras than with smaller format cameras before diffraction starts to become a significant problem for a given print size. This is great news, especially if you’re going to be doing landscapes, still lives, or any number of other subjects that requires a substantial depth of field to be used.

The Camera Makes You Think
All technical things aside, this may be one of the most important benefits of owning and using a 4x5 view camera. Many photographers, myself included, see the quality of their work increase noticeably, not just in terms of print quality, but much more importantly in the way they begin to “build” their photographs. The way each shot must be carefully set up, the ground glass studied to make sure everything’s just right really teaches the careful photographer about the structure of their photograph and how to consciously improve upon it. In my experience these understandings and lessons will then carry back over to other formats.

There are a number of other advantages to using 4x5 view cameras that would be a bit lengthy to go into on this post. One of the most notable ones being the ability to tilt and shift the lens and back of the camera to change apparent perspectives in your photograph. This is an extremely powerful capability of the view camera that I will right something in depth about soon.