With a rubber washer and a little black tape, I made the opera glass lens f6.3. It’s not quite the f8 or f11 I was hoping for, but it’s a significant jump from f3. This really helped with the depth of field.
Tag: MC-Tea
Carnations and bottles
Spent some time today with the opera glass lens again. We had a vase of carnations around the house so I grabbed them to shoot. I also added a few liquor bottle to round out the still life.
Such crazy narrow depth of field and blur around the edges. I want to take this lens outside to see how it does landscapes.
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.
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.
Ed Keer 