Anonymous Vernacular

Yesterday I developed 40 sheets of 4×5 from my recent trip with Mark to Las Vegas where I visited my brother’s family. As the last batch of Ilford FP4+ went up on the fishing wire in the bathroom to dry I decided to find the dremel tool and mount up some lenses for the 11×14 Burke & James camera I picked up last week that has been staring at me like a wounded dog from the corner of the studio floor.

For those who aren’t familiar, with large format cameras, lenses are mounted onto the cameras using boards that are just flat pieces of wood, metal, or polycarbo-whatsinit so as long as you can physically mount the lens onto the board you can use it on your camera. In the large format world you can mount your Nikon  (yes, Nikon makes large format lenses, but no, Canon does not) or Ilex lens onto an Ebony or Chamonix camera as long as it physically fits–and those names are real manufacturers, though Ilex and Nikon no longer make large format lenses

So I needed enlarge the holes in the lensboards so I could mount up the big brass cannon lenses, which is why the Dremel tool was required; I just ground the holes so the flange that the lens screws into could be mounted. Now I had two lenses mounted, a Bausch & Lomb copy of a Dallmeyer 6D, which is a 24″ f/6 lens and a Dallmeyer 3A which is a 16″ f/4 lens.

You’ll notice that the focal lengths are given in inches and not mm, but multiply the inches by 25.4 to get the length in mm, so the 6D copy is a ~600mm f/6 lens and the 3A is a ~400mm f/4. For those more familiar with the millimeter designations given to lenses for 35mm cameras these might seem like extreme telephoto lenses, but they are most definitely not. The “normal” lens for a given format, according to Wikipedia (yes, I know, the end-all-be-all of legitimate academic research), is”

a lens that generates images that generally look “natural” to a human observer under normal viewing conditions, as compared with lenses with longer or shorter focal lengths.

So for a 35mm camera this is around 50mm, 150mm for 4″ x 5″ sheet film, 300mm for 8″x10″ sheet film, and for an 11″ x 14″ camera the normal lens is just a little bit under 450mm, or right around 18″

Looking at the numbers given for a normal lens for the 11″x14″ camera, the lenses I have mounted are both longer (6D) and shorter (3A) than a normal lens, but the 18″ Verito I have sitting next to a virgin lensboard is spot on.  By “virgin” lensboard, I of course mean one that has not been defiled by shoving a phallic lens through it–which I will do tonight. It doesn’t seem right to start my 11×14 journey with only 2 of the 3 lenses mounted,–”Wait, what’s that? You mean to say you haven’t shot with the 11×14 yet?!?” Nope, I haven’t. I have mounted the 2 lenses, I have set up the camera and looked through the ground glass, but I haven’t shot anything with it yet.

The 11×14 camera is big; it is not like how the Canon EOS 1Ds Mk2n is bigger than a Canon Rebel, this is like how a Ford Superduty is bigger than a Smart Car. The first time I began shooting 8×10 I didn’t realize the extra effort it would require to shoot nor the time requirements involved–bigger is never necessarily better, but bigger is always bigger–and this soured me on the experience, so with 11×14 I am doing things in what I would call the “right way” for me. This way has me spending time practicing, (yes, you read that correctly)–practicing with the camera before I even load a holder because so much work goes into making even one exposure that I don’t want to waste it on making stupid/crappy pictures that turn me off from the whole process. Making photographs is like walking into the candy store, but what if on your first trip in you only tasted the black licorice (I hate black licorice)? It would sour you on the whole experience, which is why I am taking my foray into the ULF (that’s Ultra Large Format) world one small step at a time.

Tonight: mount up the 18″ Verito and get a feel on focussing and mounting up each of the lenses. Compare the field of view of each of the lenses, the 3A, Verito, and the 6D on one subject on both 8×10 and 11×14–the 11×14 has an 8×10 reducing back.