Anonymous Vernacular

Last night I mounted up the 18″ Verito then took the dog out while hauling the Canon digi camera. While we were outside Zeus cracked the skies wide open and I managed to sneak off some shots of the lightning before the heavens poured down on us. Once back inside (and dry) I compared the views between the 3 different lenses I have mounted for the 11×14 (Dallmeyer 3A, 18″ Verito, and 6D clone) and decided I’d had the 18″ Verito too long without making a self-portrait with it so….

I still had the camera setup and focused on a lamp so I moved the lit bulb on the lamp to the location where I wanted sharpest focus for the self-portrait. This is all best-guess work, though I can fix the place of best focus by tying string to the camera and knotting the length where focus is sharpest, but such a task is best handled by 2 people–I’m doing all of this solo.

Mark still had my lightmeter, which i realized wasn’t going to be an issue as it was dark enough now that I had to worry about having enough light! Out comes an Alien Bees B800 in a 32″ x 40″ softbox (or so, I’m not too sure on the size of the softbox) cranked up to full power and just out of view of the 11×14′s lens a little camera left and above. I left a lamp on behind my position during the exposure to help pop me out from the background, but next time I will try it without the light to compare. There was no metering needed because I figured I had one of three possible results:

1. The right amount of light for the low key image I wanted.
2. Not enough light and the subtler details would be lost or in a more extreme case I would record no image data at all.
3. Too much light and I would blow the highlights all over the place.

If the result was #1 then, hey, I’d doing great! #2 and there wasn’t too much I could do without removing the softbox and having a harsher light as I had the monobloc cranked up to max. #3 and I could just reshoot after turning the power on the light down.

Then I need some sort of light sensitive material so I cut down a sheet of Arista II Grade 2 Glossy 11×14 RC paper I purchased from Freestyle Photographic (the film holder won’t take a full 11×14 sheet so I trimmed the edges slightly) and loaded one sheet into each side of the holder. Then I mixed up some Dektol about 1:30 (wanted it dilute to keep down the high contrast of paper negatives), some fixer at paper strength (1:7 with water), and filled a 3rd 11×14 tray with water for wash. Now the fun part of figuring out how to make all of this work as the 18″ Verito doesn’t even have a shutter let along a flash sync! Between my iso 2-6 paper speed for the negative, my f/4 lens racked out to 1:2 macro making the exposure one stop slower due to bellows compensation, and the low ambient light I could easily go a couple of seconds of exposure from ambient without affecting my flash. Steps I took to make this happen:

1. Focus on light
2. Cut down RC 11×14 paper under safelight and load into holders
3. Mix up Dektol, fixer, and wash bath
4. Check focus on light
5. Check aperture on lens and put on lens cap
6. Load 11×14 holder and pull darkslide
7. Put darkslide back in, take out 11×14 holder, take out the sheet of cut-down RC paper that was too small and fell out of the holder
8. Insert 11×14 with opposite side towards the lens and pull darkslide
9. Cross fingers
10. Check monobloc is set to full power and check sync cord connection between it and the Canon digi-camera
11. Move stand-in model (the light) and stand in its place
12. Remove lens cap from 18″ Verito
13. Line myself by best-guess to where I should be
14. Snap off a frame with the Canon digi-camera setting off the strobe
15. Put lens cap back on 18″ Verito
16. Slide darkslide back in and remove 11×14 holder from the camera
17. Develop, fix, and wash the 11×14 paper neg under a safelight in the bathroom
18. Break down the equipment and make the wife a late dinner
19. Scan the negative at work the next day on the Epson 10000XL flatbed scanner
20. Write blog post

You can see the image at the top of this post and the end result was a bit between my exposure scenarios #2 and #1, but leaning more towards #1, i.e. the exposure I was wanting! The exposure was pretty spot on as it was for what I envisioned, but the placement of the light threw an odd shadow across the top of my head making me look like I have a lop-sided haircut. This is easily fixed by raising the light higher and getting it more over the camera lens (the taking lens on the 11×14), but by doing this I will lose the silky shadow detail I have in the lower portion of the frame (the upraised hands holding the camera will block more of the light) so I will fix this and add a little more fill light by placing another light below the 11×14 taking lens set to 1-2 stops less power or if I have a clean sheet of white foam core I’ll just bounce it in by taping the foam core in place to the camera itself.

You can see the image much larger and on black here: View On Black

Tonight I am going to do a couple more shots playing with the lighting and some bounce cards and if Mark swings by to develop his 4×5 negatives from the Vegas trip then I’ll do some pictures of him, too.

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.