Camera Talk

In the interest of not leaving poor Scott hanging out there all by himself, a couple of recent large-format shots.

First, a shot from a workshop I took at the George Eastman house in October on pouring your own dry plates. I'm excited about learning to create my own emulsions with their own characteristics from scratch. This shot was taken in the garden of Eastman House. The emulsion we shot in the class was somewhere around ISO 1, the plate was one I poured myself and was shot in a 4x5 Speed Graphic belonging to Nick Brandreth:


CG-001, Urn and greenhouse by rbrazile, on Flickr

The second is a shot from my first test run after fixing up an old Eastman Kodak No 2D 8x10 field camera. Still needs to have a slight split in the rail reglued and I need to find an extension rail that actually matches my camera (the one that came with it unfortunately seems to be from another camera and the teeth on the rack don't quite line up with those on the main rails. Otherwise it's fully functional. The test shots were on Ektascan B/RA, a single-sided orthochromatic film intended for medical use. I guessed at the ISO and the processing, as usual (I need to do more formal testing, but haven't had the time or the patience yet) so this was underexposed. I still like the results, and with some work I could do well enough with it. I know Scott has had some luck with it.


2D-001, First 2D photograph by rbrazile, on Flickr

Robert

Nice! I can't imagine pouring my own plates. That's got to be a fun thing, and yours turned out great. And I've been watching the 8x10 rehab. Nice rig.

Thanks for posting these!

Robert,
That is interesting stuff. Nice to keep old technology and skills alive like that. Good luck!

Dennis

Thanks, Scott and Dennis. Scott, given your mechanical ability, you could do the dry plate stuff without any difficulty. After all, it was done by amateurs from the beginning. It's basically just a matter of making some gelatin, mixing in bromide and iodide, injecting it with a silver nitrate solution in a controlled way, then washing the resulting emulsion to get rid of excess bromide. Then you re-melt it, pour it on a glass plate, let it dry, and it's ready to shoot. A bit fussy, but not difficult, and you can affect the shooting characteristics via variables such as temperature control and how fast you inject the silver.

You get an orthochromatic emulsion in the end, and you get to control the speed and grain of it via the variables above. Also means you can shoot any size you want; you just pour that size plate. I'm looking forward to experimenting with panoramic sizes; mostly a matter of fashioning a holder for the plate.

You could even do your own film, if you wanted to experiment with that; just need a poly substrate of some kind instead of glass -- but you'd probably want an emulsion coating blade to do that properly. I'm not there yet.

It's amusing stuff, and I can recommend the workshops at GEH; they're fascinating and fun.

Robert

Sounds like fun, Robert, but requires time that I have to devote other places these days. Which is why I almost never shoot film anymore, let alone large format. Trying to change that, but doesn't look good.

Good luck in the search for a rail. It's been my experience that, even with rails for similar models by the same manufacturer, the pitch is likely different. Almost impossible to find matching racks.

Scott