A few months ago I got a large format camera. In case you're not familiar with them, these are cameras that shoot on very large negatives. Each piece of film is an individual shot. In my particular case, the sheets of film are 4 x 5 inches (about 11 x 13 cm). To give you a sense of the resolution, if you use the highest-quality scanner out there to scan one of these sheets of film, you get about a 13-gigabyte scan. Gigabytes. Huge.
It's quite a lot of work to take a photograph with these cameras, but it's very rewarding. First, these cameras are capable of feats that smaller cameras just can't do. You can adjust perspective (for instance, where buildings appear to lean because you are shooting up at them). You can also adjust the plane of focus. With a normal camera, the plane of focus is always vertical (i.e. everything at a certain distance from the camera is in focus). However, with a large format camera you can make it so that the plane of focus is different, even horizontal. This means that the ground in front of you and the ground 5 km away are all in focus, but the top of the fence three feet in front of you is completely blurry. There is a lot of potential for creative effects, to say the least.
I'm really enjoying using large format gear. It's really fun and even though the camera takes a long time to set up, I don't mind. It makes me slow down and think more, and that's no bad thing.
Two of my favourite photography sites... the Analog Photography Users' Group ... and the Large Format Photography site. The first site is exclusively about film photography, which works fine with me since that's all I shoot (and I all I want to, in case you're feeling sorry for me). I love computers, but I have no desire to do any of my photography on one. :)