This week I’m going into the darkroom for the first time in a year. As much as I am looking forward to printing silver gelatin, I’m glad I spent the time off doing cyanotypes.
You stop
Tag: speed graphic
I’m Outside
The weather wasn’t horrible yesterday so I took my Speed Graphic with the DIY lens outside. I wanted to see what the lens would look like wide open at medium distance. And then I shot some close-ups of dead flowers too. Film is my last few sheets of Ilford Ortho Plus.
Papers Please
Normally I do my lith prints on Fomatone MG 131 paper. But lately I’ve been experimenting with different papers to see what looks I can get. Here’s some examples on Ilford Warmtone MGFB, Fomatone MG 131, and Agfa Brovira 310. I like the Ilford the best, but the Agfa is also nice.
Another Simple Lens
Picked up a new lens from Surplus Shed for the Speed Graphic. It’s an achromatic, coated 145mm lens at roughly f3. It should have fewer aberrations than the opera glass lens though it’s hard to tell wide open like this.
I also bought some Ilford Ortho Plus, which looks great!
f6.3
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.
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.
Coffee with Mom and Dad
I had an extra day off this week after the 4th, so I visited my parents and finally got them to sit for coffee portraits.
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 