The Photographic Historical Society of Canada

Observations of a Large Format Photographer
Rob Skeoch (pronounced "skew")
Program date: March 19, 2008

Rob Skeoch
Rob Skeoch

hockey hustle
hockey hustle

ice ballet
ice ballet

hoop-eye view
hoop-eye view

some raquet
some raquet

crash
crash

lively Leaf
lively Leaf

jumping Jay
jumping Jay

ball carrier
ball carrier

re-enactment
re-enactment

new Zeiss
new Zeiss Ikon

going platinum
going platinum

restless roots
restless roots

ghostly Bodie
ghostly Bodie

Zion Park
Zion Park

Bridalveil Falls
Bridalveil Falls

Burlington studio
Burlington studio

Mount Whitney
Mount Whitney

Ebony camera
Ebony camera

Rob Skeoch’s love is large format photography. His bread and butter is sports photography. When not shooting sports or beautiful large format black and white landscapes, he is selling hard to find large format materials or off doing workshops around North America. Rob’s fresh insights on the digital evolution are based on his experiences. He prefaced his talk with a thank you to PHSC member Stan White, his teacher at Sheridan College.

Sports Photography. Most sports photos are taken using a very long lens. To capture fast action on the ice, Rob pays some $800 a game to have his camera synced to powerful strobe lights mounted high in the arena ceiling. He has also experimented with motorized remote control, once securing a pricy Hasselblad with a $7,000 wide-angle lens behind the glass back-board to get the basketball action right at the hoop.

A photographer must consider the market for his photos. For example, MacDonald’s sports cards require each photograph to show only a single player in a moment of action. The primary market for photographs of amateur sports is the parents of the athletes. After a game, Rob posts his pictures on the web for parents to see and buy. The sport itself often determines the type of picture that sells: for tennis games, it is the face, racquet and ball that count; in bicycle races, its the crashes.

Rob has lots of shots of the Maple Leafs (he shoots over 100 hockey games some years). Hockey pictures are much the same from game to game - watch the goal and press the shutter button - same action, different players. Catching players in isolated action, he gets photos that have a broader appeal than the day’s news.

Recently, he signed his 15th annual contract with Major League Baseball (MLB). He goes to venues that are attractive to clients, seldom shooting at home in Toronto because Rogers Centre (Sky Dome) is one of the worst parks in the MLB for photographs. Instead, he goes to Detroit, Cleveland or even Pittsburgh. The attributes of Rogers Centre that attracts local fans are all negatives for photo sales: Canadian team, an indoor dome, playing on astroturf. The demand is for photos of American venues and teams playing outdoors on grass.

Rob shoots at the NFL games (he rarely does the CFL). This is strictly a business decision. The NFL attracts the better photographers with its stronger market. The league provides each photographer with a list of which players to shoot. Rob then tracks his assigned players, not watching for the big play of the game. He once caught a promising player the second week of the season. The young star had just made his first professional touchdown. Unfortunately a short time later, he blew his knee out. Rob gave him a photograph to commemorate what became his only professional touchdown.

Going for the Money. Rob’s work has appeared in many big name magazines. Cosmopolitan once published a story on bachelor players using one of Rob’s photos for illustration. He described the way sports photographers stay on the sidelines of a game trying to get marketable photographs of the marque players. All money and sales come from these big names (regardless of shooting list assigned by the league). Its like wildlife photography - pictures of the rare and “big draw” animals sell, not snaps of the local squirrels and cats. A successful photographer looks ahead at the market when shooting and spends his time at leagues and parks that sell, snapping players that sell, forgoing the other locales and shots of lesser players.

Economics of Digital. Rob gets paid when one of his photos sells. After the switch to digital, the MLB couldn’t handle the volume of photographs - standard shots you can see in the sports section of any newspaper. Their solution was to sell off their portfolio to Getty Images, grand-fathering their photographers. Shooting players for MacDonald cards was a fabulous gig until the hockey strike hit - the final nail in the coffin for film. Sports photographers moved on to digital which was viewed as a saviour - much faster, cheaper and easier for a professional to take good shots. As it turned out, once the industry went digital, all the money was gone. Digital drove the price down. Professionals now take thousands of shots from which the publishers can choose the few they will publish. Recently Rob and two other sports photographers got together to publish a Canadian sports magazine - giving the sports photographers another outlet to sell pictures.

On the current digital market. Canon is presently the top selling digital camera brand. Recently in B&H Camera (more annual sales per year than the entire Canadian market), it was a photo feeding frenzy three deep around the Canon, Sony, and Nikon counter. Not a soul around the medium format display. Leica’s recently released M8 - digital version of its famous M series rangefinder family - is a love/hate product. The digital Hasselblad is better quality - you see it on TV but few photographer’s use it.

History Lesson. Rob started his history overview with the 1860 era wet-plate photographers who had to create their “film”, shoot and process in the field all before the emulsion dried, and moved quickly on to the pivotal 35mm camera of the 20th century noting the 1924 Leica became the first of many commercially successful miniature cameras using what was originally movie film. Legend has it the 36 exposures represent the number of shots that would fit on a strip of film the length of Leica creator Oskar Barnack’s arm.

Many famous photographers embraced the miniature cameras for their convenience, speed and flexibility. Leica photographer Cartier-Bresson of “decisive moment” fame made and sold many photographs. His more famous “first tier” photos sell for around eight to ten thousand dollars today with many copies on the market. Ironically, his second tier photos - those that didn’t sell very well when first offered - are harder to find today and worth much more. His poorly selling “crowd scene” print for example sells for as much as a quarter million dollars today!

As the quality of the miniature cameras and their images improved, they became the preferred instrument to capture documentary photo stories. Their rise in popularity paralleled the wars and music revolutions of the era. Think of Johnny Cash at Folsom prison, Bob Dylan rolling a tire, Beetles snapped by Harry Benson who had unlimited access to the group.

Good news. Bad news. To Rob, digital cameras are like the microwave - fast and convenient, but the result is lacking in flavour and texture. When film was king, a photographer would sell a good photo to a big newspaper (e.g. the New York Times) for a few hundred dollars and it would be on the front page. Colour shots on Kodachrome slides meant the photograph was tied up on an editor’s desk for two weeks. Today, the digital images are accessible on-line and can be used over and over again. Any newspaper or magazine publisher can search a database for a player’s name and quickly bring up hundreds of images, choose one, buy limited rights for $25.00, and send it off to layout. No one cares anymore whether an image is exclusive.

Longing for the past. There is still quite a following for rangefinder photography. Recently Leica introduced a working copy of the pre 1924 prototype “Ur Leica”. It is hard to use, but gives a feel for the start of 35mm photography. In 2000, Nikon introduced a remake of its famous 1958 S3 rangefinder camera. Zeiss has joined the parade with their own 35mm camera (Zeiss has lost markets for its lenses, once used by Hasselblad, Fuji and Contax). They chose to make a rangefinder model using a lens mount patterned after the well established Leica M mount. Rob noted that a group of rangefinder enthusiasts recently met in Montreal to shoot models and street scenes.

More means much less. Rob suggested the famous photograph of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident was the last photograph that really mattered. Digital is huge. Today we have cameras in phones (phones in cameras?) and far too many photographs being taken. Rob related how his daughters went with him on a shoot in New York City. He exposed only 12 rolls of film over the four days - the girls took around 5,000 digital images just looking around the Big Apple. Too much is seen by too many - you can no long quantify images. Photographs no longer matter - except to a wedding photographer and his clients. The family photographer’s duty is to capture his wife in front of the Eiffel Tower - nobody cares about his other pictures. The amateur is now free to do what he wants (freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose -Janice Joplin).

Nothing left to lose. Today’s photographers can do as they wish - some go back to glass plates. Buying vintage lenses on eBay, setting up a wagon and doing the wet plate experience right down to shooting at civil war re-enactments. Another popular niche is platinum paper printing. It takes a high level of skill to make these beautiful images with their long tonal range and detailed shadows. Platinum prints are made by contact printing, ruling out the Leicas and Hasselblads - even a 4x5 negative is too small. The true enthusiast looks to an 8 x 10 or larger camera. This is the niche were people get excitement. One sheet of 20 x 24 film costs $30 and fits in a $30,000 camera the size of a Smart car.

Saving Grace. While the proliferation of digital images negated the value of the photograph, digital saved photography. Fifteen years ago it cost the snap-shooter thirty dollars to process a roll of film. When Chapters first opened, the chain sold two photography magazines and fifteen on golf. Today, they offer some thirty photography magazines. Digital has stabilized photography, introducing the art to a whole new generation. Many of the new recruits are becoming interested in the older processes, pin-hole cameras, infra-red, etc. These are the best times for photography with so many options both digital and traditional - black & white, transparencies, glass, platinum.

Discovering Large Format. Everyone thought that sports photography would recover after the Hockey strike. When it didn’t, Rob had to look at other options. He had learned 4x5 in college and wanted to go back to it, but he sold his 4x5 enlarger years earlier. He decided it would be easier to talk his wife into the purchase of an 8x10 camera instead of a 4x5 and another enlarger. Getting an 8x10 off eBay, Rob discovered the film, and lenses were hard to find. Realizing other large format enthusiasts faced the same problem, he searched out off-shore suppliers and began stocking and selling 5x5 8x20 16x20 and some 4x5 materials by mail. This business has expanded to include modern large format 8x10 cameras (the Ebony line - looks old but it is a state of the art view camera) tripods, lenses and papers. His “cottage industry” sells only the hard to find materials and tools for large format.

Fine Art Days. Rob’s first 8x10 was a used Deardorff (rumoured to be made from the mahogany of bars closed by prohibition). He takes nature shots of roots and rocks at places like Rattlesnake Point and Algonquin Park in Ontario and he has photos in 38 different books - the more recent books are mostly his photographs. Rob sells his fine art photographs for a modest $500 to $800 at shows instead of using a gallery.

He also favours some spots in the US, for example Bodie California, across the rockies from San Francisco were he photographed an old gold rush days salon building. Using an orange filter with black and white film gives an infra-red look to some shots. In the mountains, the early morning sun is best as shown by his photograph of Mount Whitney - shots the rest of the day are flat and bland. For his first time in Zion Park, he hiked in with his 8x10 camera, set up the view he liked best and took a single photograph. The time and expense of 8x10 means at most two shots of any given view, which takes both skill and confidence. He has photographed other old buildings like the barn in an Arizona ghost town which was a prop in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. His photograph of a small nameless falls outside Boston is called “Bridalveil Falls” for its slow motion water blur and popularity as a wedding gift.

Working Studio. Rob’s studio and mail order business is in a townhouse in Burlington. Ontario. He uses his Mount Whitney photo as a business card to hand out to by- standers watching him set up his large format camera at an outdoor shoot. He uses and sells the Classic Ebony from Japan equipped with Fuji lenses imported directly from Japan (no Canadian distributor). The exposed negatives are processed using the old colour print tubes popular in the 1970s. While not a perfect system, it results in far fewer scratches than tray processing. Rob acknowledged there is a learning curve to working with large size materials in the dark. His enlarger has a cold light head which diffuses the light helping to minimize the amount of spotting that will be required.

Rob prints only one negative at a time. He finds a negative he likes, decides if it is a salable shot and if so, he makes an 8x10 print on 11x14 paper, taking detailed notes of the steps used. The rest of the morning he can make ten good 8x10 printsRob Skeoch followed by 4 or 5 11x14 prints (and the odd 20x24) in the afternoon. He sets the prints aside until the next day, then carefully assesses them and decides whether to keep them, or toss them and reprint.

In closing, Rob urged one and all to put down their digital cameras and pick up an 8x10 large format camera. “The negatives give incredible quality for the same effort in travel and set-up, so why not go for the photography?”


This page was designed in Dreamweaver CS3 on an iMac running OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Unless otherwise noted, images on this page were taken with a Sony F828 digital still camera from the screen and subsequently adjusted in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom V2 beta and Photoshop CS3. Presentation ideas and images are ©2008 by Rob Skeoch and may not be used without his permission. Copies of photographs displayed during this presentation may not be used without the copyright holder's permission. Contact PHSC at info@phsc.ca if you would like more information on the items discussed on this page.

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