It has been few months since I bought the Ebony 4x5 camera and I have been quiet busy learning how to use it since then. For my personal education I borrowed the famous Jack Dykinga’s “Large Format Nature Photography” book from Marek, and I bought “View Camera Technique” by Leslie Stroebel on Amazon. Both of these books are proving great introduction to large format camera system, but the latter gives more technical details, to which I personally begun to understand just after I started to use my camera and be able to test all the tricks in real life. I am still quite far away from mastering the large format camera technique, but I am slowly discovering the amazing potential, which such camera can provide to landscape photographer. I am especially impressed by the possibility to get the ultimate control of the “Depth of Field” even with wide angle lenses, which is quiet difficult to achieve with any other camera system I have used yet. What I actually mean is that I am now able to get just very small area in focus, while the rest is remaining blurred or out of focus, something like the lonely bench in this photograph.

I moved to Geneva in 2007 and since than the surrounding mountains were the primer target for my photography and I have been trying to get up there as often as possible. I have quite a stressful day job, so it has also been giving me the opportunity to relax and handle the daily stress a little bit better. I very often came back home from my mountain hikes physically exhausted, but with fresh mind ready for another day. When some time passed by, and we were getting more and more settled here in Geneva, I have begun to pay attention to other photo locations in my neighbourhood, and guess who was the first obvious candidate. Of course it was the lake, one of the biggest in Western Europe. To give you a brief description, the lake is split 60/40 between Switzerland and France. In Switzerland itself it goes trough three cantons (Geneva, Vaud and Valais) covering the total area of 345 square kilometres. While the entire world knows the lake under the name Lake Geneva, the locals - meaning all the many great cities on the Swiss and neighbour French shores - call it Lac Leman.