I understand what you are saying. But, there's a part of me that misses the old view camera days. I never did it for a living, just for the love of it, so it may be different for me. When I went out with the view camera, every shot was carefully considered and while a day's shooting might be only 15-20 photos, most of them were keepers. Now it's clickity click click and 95% of photos are either uninteresting or essentially duplicates. In theory, I could impose more discipline on my shooting, but for whatever reason I Don't. The fact is that the view camera hardware and procedures forced me to be disciplined.
That is exactly my experience. Don't take me wrong, I carry a D700 (yep, the FX full frame camera) and use both current versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. But when you go out with only 12 sheets of film, when you know every time you press the shutter it costs you $2.00 or more in film and chemistry, when setting up your camera takes some time, it's not just an instant reflex and when you sit in the wet darkroom and you look at the cost of a sheet of fibre based paper, you really slow down, and you really think, you think harder than you ever do with digital.
I would never give up my digital SLRs, (well, maybe some day down the road when I upgrade
), but shooting LF is a whole different kettle of fish. Not better, not worse, but it is a whole different "discipline" if you will. I think anybody and everybody who is "serious" about photography should, even just for once in their life, try shooting large format, if for nothing else, just the experience of doing so.
joe
