8x10 lens

I received my new used lens yesterday:

Schneider Symmar S 360 mm

I can not wait to get my chemicals and give 8x10 plates a try!

Home-made Red Plexiglas Silver Tank

As I am moving up to 8x10 I have to upscale a lot of my equipment, including my silver tank. I had built my first tank out of red Plexiglas and decided I would do the same. The tank looks great and the red Plexiglas filters out some of the light that could fog my plates. 

Here is a picture of my old silver tank:

It has worked great and I have loved it, but I wanted to change the stand. When I had the Plexiglas cut last year, the two triangles of the stand cost me as much as all the other pieces. Also I wanted a tank with a smaller footprint for transport. I like the design of Lund Photographics ‘ traveling tanks and decided to emulate their stand.

Here is the plan I used to get the Plexiglas cut:

 

Here are all the pieces:

I just needed to assemble them.

Half of the tank gluing.

I inserted the stand hardware before gluing the top of the tank.

Tank of the left and cover on the right.

 

I made the stand out of aluminum: 1/8” thick and ¾” wide. It was easy enough to drill through and to bend into shape:

 Here is the finished product:

Front

Side.

Eventually I will put a rubber gasket in the lid and install latches to make it waterproof and allow the transport of silver nitrate in the tank itself.

Blazing the trail in Colorado!

Since doing wet-plate collodion landscapes I have been dreaming of taking my mobile darkroom on mountain trails and gain access to the many vistas that are not accessible by roads.

I thought I could combine my love for mountain biking with my passion for wet-plate photography, so my idea was to rig a bike trailer as a mobile darkroom. There seems to be many ways to do this: you can buy dedicated cargo trailer (but they are expensive), you can build your own trailer (which I will do eventually) or you can adapt an inexpensive kids trailer…

By the time my daughters outgrew our trailer, the fabric was too damaged to pass the trailer on to someone else. I took it apart and only kept the bottom frame. It was more than a year ago. I knew that eventually I would do something with it. It all came together last weekend:

As such I can use the trailer to transport cargo, go grocery shopping, rig it to Enora’s trail-a-bike and become a three-component biking machine (which entertains my daughter very much).

It so happens that my cardboard darkbox fit perfectly on top of the frame. This leaves a space under the box, so I had to reinforce its bottom with a couple pieces of composite wood panels. The question that was left was: Can I fit all my gear, chemicals and developing equipment in the darkbox for transport? I could:

So I was ready to go and try it out.

Since I started mountain biking in the foothills, I have wanted to photograph a particular view of Eldorado Canyon. I knew where I would be going.

I packed everything in the car:

Once at the trailhead, I unpacked everything, set the darkbox on the trailer and headed out. After a couple minutes and a steep slope, I needed a break:

After about another 15 minutes I was looking at my favorite vista in the foothills. I disconnected the trailer from the bike:

This what it looks like when I start unpacking:

The darkbox stays on the trailer at all times, I just sit of the ground and wrap myself in the dark cloth.

Here is one the plates I did:

It is not one of my best plates but still a satisfying result for a first try-out.

I am pretty happy with the day. The trailer and gear are pretty heavy, but I managed to pull the load. I haven’t broken any equipment. I met a couple people who were very curious about my set-up and seem to enjoy learning about the process. 

There are a couple things I need to adjust: I had only used a couple screws and bolts to attached the wood to the bottom of the box, it wasn’t enough and one part of the cardboard got torn. I am thinking that I need to cut a sheet of plywood that would cover the entire bottom of the box and one that would be become the inside surface of the darkbox; I could then sandwich the cardboard between the two and have a very sturdy bottom.

I will keep you posted on my next bike trip.

Moving up in wet-plate collodion photography

During my first year taking wet-plate collodion photographs, I have used an inexpensive 4x5 Omega view camera, fitted with a normal 210 mm lens. 

My trusty 4x5 Omega View.

Although it is a modern large format camera designed to shoot with film, using it for wet-plate collodion only required a simple modification of the film holder. 

It is fairly easy to modify a modern film holder to accept thicker aluminum or glass plates.

At the beginning I felt somewhat limited by the size of my tintypes (3.25x4 in), but learnt to love the format and the intricate delicacy of the small photographs.

This is my favorite portrait of Elaiza from the Collodion365 project

Nonetheless I have decided to move up and invest in a larger 8x10 camera. After much research and soul searching, I found a camera that seemed to fit my needs and my budget: a calumet C1. As most people, I eventually found myself on ebay bidding on a C1 and biting my nails hoping that someone wouldn’t outbid me within the last few seconds of the auction. After a little bit of drama, I received the beast yesterday:

The Calumet C1!

With an old fashion 35 mm Canon SLR to give a sense of scale.

Its cosmetic condition shows that it has been well used, but as the Calumet C1 has a reputation of toughness and longevity I am not too worried. The crucial point is that the bellows are light tight and that all movements are operational.

I chose a C1 for a few reasons:

·      It is a workhorse, and is tough as nail.

·      It folds to a somewhat manageable size.

·      It has a lot of bellows. (I take a lot of still life photographs with small objects, but I don’t have the finances to buy a dedicated macro lens, so I have to rely on long bellows to achieve an adequate reproduction ratio.)

·      It has a lot of movements: tilt, swing and shift in front, tilt and swing in back.

·      It is affordable.

Of course the camera has some drawbacks:

·      It is very heavy (16 lbs)

·      It is pretty ugly…

Now I am in search of a lens for my lovely monster. I have to say that I have learnt a lot about large format lenses in the past few days. Here is a very brief and crude list of information that I found useful when shopping for a lens:

1.     A normal lens for an 8x10 falls in the 300 – 360 mm range of focal lengths. A wide angle lens would have a focal length inferior to 240 mm.

2.      With an 8x10 camera, the minimum lens coverage is 13 in. or about 330 mm. 

3.     You can easily find information on the internet on each lens coverage. It just take a bit of time, and is not that exciting…

4.     The best resource I have found to get acquainted with large format lens is: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lenses-primer/

5.     You can find convertible lenses that will offer two or three different focal length depending on how many of the lens’ elements you decide to shoot with. It might be an affordable alternative to buying multiple lenses.

I will keep you posted on my progress...