Movement of the lens board on a view camera is intended to adjust the plane of focus. The lens board can be shifted up or down, or left or right. As well, it can be tilted forward or backwards on its horizontal axis or on its vertical access. Movement along the vertical axis is referred to as swing1.
Swinging the lens board is usually used to change the plane of focus to follow a diagonal line within the image. In this experiment I swing the lens board to see the effect on a wooden carving of an elk.
The lens was shot wide open at f/5.62 creating a shallow depth of field to make the impact of swinging more visible. As this is my first test of using camera movements with the digital back, it is comforting to see that the results are as expected.
- Wikipedia Contributors. 2024. “View Camera.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. January 19, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_camera#Swing. ↩︎
- f/5.6 on a 4×5 camera is approximately equivalent to f/1.4 on a full frame camera ↩︎
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