The old map room at the Royal Geographical Society, Kensington Gore, London. ..Manfrotto.This is the old Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, London. A venerable institution, more or less next to the Royal Albert Hall. Built in 1830, this was the core of the Society, which built up a fantastic collection of maps, for which it became famous. Within a few years, the Society reported that the Map Room was “now daily visited by intelligent strangers as well as members generally.” Presumably, being a member already qualified you as intelligent (hope so, as I’m a member). Maybe the strangers were assessed on how they asked for maps and whether they could tell north from south...I had an assignment to shoot the workings of the Society, who do expeditions and field research all over the world. This was a key shot, not least because it has since been completely re-modeled. I wanted to get as much in as possible, a really frame-filled shot, and especially I wanted to have the overall Map Room plus important maps from its collection. That’s frequently a demand of magazine assignments: because you’re always fighting for space and there’s never room for all the pictures you want to include, some images have to do the work of two or more. In this case, the level of detail had to extend to the handwritten not in the corner of one map that identifies it as the Africa expedition map drawn by David Livingstone (of ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ fame). ..Getting all this detail made it a natural job for 4x5-inch film and a view camera (these were pre-digital days, and in any case the resolution on sheet film is incomparable). But depth of field wasn’t going to be the answer to getting it all sharp, from close-up to distance. Instead, I need the wonderfully-named Scheimpflug Principle, also know as Scheimpflug’s Condition (which sounds like a rare disease)...According to this principle, which depends on rotating either the lens panel or the film holder, or both, wherever the lens plane and the film plane intersect, the plane of focus extends from that point.