I need to buy Kris new opera glasses

I made a lens for my Graflex Speed Graphic out of a broken pair of opera glasses. It’s a simple, one element lens. My rough calculations make it to be 63mm and f3.2.

The first images came out nice. I will experiment more. I definitely want to stop it down to f8 or f11.

Shot on Fomapan 200. Developed in MC-TEA.

American Girl Doll horse

A little closer look

Foam core lens board

The whole thing

Nothing better

There is nothing like the feeling of spending an afternoon mixing up a developer from scratch and then developing film with it and pulling negatives out of the tank to see actual images. It’s magic.

Today I mixed up a recipe from Peter Svensson (see this thread) based on Patrick Gainer’s PC-Tea:

…heat about 120 ml of TEA in pyrex container. I think about 200F is a good temperature. Then mix in 35g of Vitamin C-1000 and 6g of metol and stir to dissolve. Add TEA to make 150ml total.

To use as a one-shot:

• MC-Tea 1:100 + 1/2 tsp sodium sulfate per ~250 ml water

Just mix the MC-Tea with water and sodium sulfate.

For Fomapan 200 (box speed) I develop for 13:30 minutes at 25° C. Agitation is 5 times every minute.

Hammond Pond, Goshen Massachusetts