Ann Arbor-based physician and photography-enthusiast Stephen Rosenblum was visiting the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture competition when he came across this giant large format camera that some giant snowman must have accidentally dropped earlier. The 12-foot tall camera was even hollowed out to look realistically like the inside of bellows from behind.

You can see the winners of the 2011 competition (and catch a glimpse of this camera) here.

(via The Online Photographer)

Image credit: Photograph by Stephen Rosenblum and used with permission

Solaroids are unique prints created by photographer Jeff Mclane by exposing large format (4×5 in) Fuji instant film to direct UV light for long periods of time.
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This foam core 8×10 camera was created by Daire Quinlan, the same guy that attached a 90 year old lens to his camera with homemade bellows.

The lens is an Industar 37 Russian large format 300mm designed for their FKD cameras. The shutter is a Sinar, takes standard 8×10 film holders.

Quinlan exposes onto photo paper instead of film, and focuses the camera by sliding the rear box forward and backward.
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Meet the 20×24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid’s founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.
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John Chiara is a San Francisco-based photographer that uses an uber-large format camera the size of a trailer that he constructed himself. The camera is so dang big that setting up the thing requires a car jack and lots of yanking. After setting up the film inside the camera, Chiara climbs out of the camera through a long black garbage-bag style tube. To develop the prints, he uses an 18-inch diameter sewage pipe that he pours chemicals into and rolls around on the ground.
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Aaron Gustafson, a Seattle-based artist, has become the first person to ever shoot large format photographs while skydiving. Using a custom large format helmet camera he designed himself, Gustafson made one large format photograph on each jump while traveling at speeds upwards of 130 miles per hour.

The helmet camera is a cube-shaped acrylic and aluminum box that uses a wide angle lens and contains a single sheet of 4×5” large format film.

Gustafson says,

I wanted to upend the norms by making a [large-format] camera to be used in a wildly different way. This is what you’d get if you threw Ansel Adams out of a plane. [...] Photography is in a strange place now where everyone is taking camera-phone snapshots and posting them online. But photography can still be grand and larger-than-life. This project came out of a desire for that. It’s a hybrid of new and old, calm and chaos.

Here’s a video documenting one of his photographic jumps:

To see more of his work, you can visit Gustafson’s website.

(via PhotographyBLOG)