The Last Worker

Composing on location with my large-format camera means peering into a five-by-seven sheet of frosted ground glass, focusing with a loupe, and gently nudging the camera left, right, up or down to nail the composition.

The projected image on the ground glass is dim, inverted, reversed and delicate. To see it at all, I need to throw a dark cloth over the camera and duck underneath, sealing out the daylight.

There are much easier ways to make photographs. 

My digital camera needs no dark cloth, sheet film, or even a tripod. But its conveniences never satisfy me the way working with my big wooden camera does, clumsy, stubborn, and slow as it is.

The lens on it is old. But the shutter still fires and its aperture turns like it did the day the last worker at the factory polished the front glass element and nestled it into its satin-lined box for delivery in 1976.