Large format photography fun
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The bellows camera arrived today. It’s awesome. This is the third picture I’ve taken with it. It came with a Lomograflok back which lets me take large format pictures straight onto Instax Wide film. As you can see, it mostly works. The picture is of some Spintronics components. It turns out that by extending the bellows nearly all the way out you can make a pretty good close up camera. I’ve just noticed that the copy of the image I took above is a bit messy because I just grabbed a snapshot of it with the phone. Sorry about that. If you are wondering, this is how you take a picture:
Clip the ground class screen onto the back of the camera with the Lomograflok spacer between it and the camera.
Open the shutter.
Set the aperture to F5.6 so you can see a faint image on the ground glass screen.
Adjust the focus until the image looks sharp, and then frame the picture.
Use a magnifying glass to make sure that the image really is sharp.
Close the shutter.
Use a light meter to get the shutter speed and aperture and set them on the camera lens.
Cock the shutter.
Remove the ground class screen.
Turn the Lomograflok back on.
Slide the Lomograflok back onto the camera and clip it into place.
Remove the dark slide (a metal plate that keeps light off the film) from the Lomograflok back.
Trigger the shutter.
Put the dark slide back into the Lomograflok back.
Remove the Lomograflok back from the camera.
Eject the photograph from the Lomograflok back.
Wait for it to develop.
I’m not going to show you pictures four and five that I took because I forgot to put the darkslide back into the camera Graflok back (step 14) after taking the shot, and ruined them both...
At the moment it is taking me around five minutes per shot. Perhaps I will improve with practice. Then again, perhaps not. I’ve got some film holders that you can also use with the camera, enough to hold four shots. I don’t think I’ll be taking many pictures with it, but I think they are going to great fun.
