Portraits with the Wooden View Camera

12 Feb
2010

Last year this camera was restored: http://www.zorkikat.com/ancient-wooden-field-view-camera-restoration/229/

Since then, I’ve shot a few ‘tests’ with it, taking it outdoors, and sometimes indoors too.

Then these last two days, I decided to use it for portraits. The sitters were friends who visited the studio, who gladly agreed to be tortured into sitting for a cumbersome camera. Getting 3 or 4 shots for each sitter can be considered plenty. That they too, dug Archaic Photography made the convincing easier.

Instead of film, I used photographic Bromide Paper . This is the REAL photographic paper which has a light-sensitive coating, used for traditional black and white “wet” printing in the darkroom. Sheets were cut into 4X5 in pieces to fit the film holders. After exposure, the sheets were brought into the darkroom where they were processed in regular paper developing chemistry. The result is a BW negative on paper:

Exposure was the same as for film, except that lots more, in terms of light or exposure time was needed. The effective “speed” of paper was less than ISO 10. That means that even in bright sunny conditions, an exposure of 1/10 sec would be needed at f/16. Paper is also coated with NON-PANCHROMATIC emulsions- they’re sensitive only to blue and some green, but not to yellow and red. Thus reds and yellows tend to look dark. Ruddy skins look so dark that they make the sitters look overly tanned.

The lenses used for most the photos was an INDUSTAR-51 210mm. This is a Tessar type lens, with a maximum f/4,5 aperture. It doesn’t have a shutter so the lens cap method was used- cover lens, lift off cap for exposure, count in seconds, and then cap again. The “slow” photo paper worked quite nicely with the arragement.

The first victim, KARLO. This one was shot with an Ortagoz 135mm lens. Some distortion occured because of the short focus distance. The lens was about 25 cm from Karlo’s face. Lighting was from afternoon sunlight coming through the windows. The tanned look resulted from the paper’s lack of red sensitivity.

Karlo has used this photo for his school card IDs…:)

The next set involved a different setup. The photos were all shot using the 210mm lens. This lens was meant to be used with the bigger 5X7 negative. It behaved like a short telephoto with the smaller 4X5 plate. Which is quite nice since long lenses do better in portraiture.

(All the exposures where made with OPEN FLASH. The lens had no shutter, so it was capped to protect the sensitive paper from unwanted exposure, During exposure, the cap was lifted, the studio strobes fired, and then the lens was capped again. Lighting with studio strobes in softboxes.)

1.BAM

(the Print from the Negative shown above)