Trial Run

I am wanting to do some portraits with my plate cameras.  It seemed only fair and prudent to first subject myself to the process.

I picked a corner with reasonably good light and propped a box up where I thought my head would appear.  I focused on a barcode on the front of the box and then substituted my nose for the barcode.  I made the shot using my longest cable release with the camera set to 1/2 second and f/22.

Shooting closeups with the Kodak Recomar 18 or any of the plate cameras is not for the impatient or the faint of heart.  With the dark slide in place, the roll film holder is replaced with the ground glass back for focusing.  The lens is opened wide for visibility and the shutter is actuated on the T setting to hold it open.  With the focus established, the shutter is closed and then set to the speed indicated by the meter, with a sufficiently small aperture to ensure adequate depth of focus.  Finally, the ground glass back is removed and replaced with the film back, hopefully without disturbing the positioning of the camera on the tripod.  The dark slide is pulled up and the exposure is made.

Back to the Plate Cameras

 After talking recently with Vince Lupo about the nice results he has gotten from his Ermanox I was inspired to get back to shooting with my own plate cameras.  They are not as exotic as the Ermanox, but the lenses are good and the big negatives from 120 film produce very nice images. 

Since I had not used the plate cameras in some time I had to go through them to check functionality and make sure no pinholes had appeared in the bellows.  The Patent Etui looked pretty good, but I'm going to have to clean the shutter before it can make pictures for me again.  I couldn't find any pinholes in the Bentzin Primar bellows, and the big old Compur shutter remains very reliable, so that was it.  I loaded the camera with my last roll of HP5+ and went to the Botanical Garden which is now fully open again.

It took me half the roll of eight shots to get back into something approaching a competent performance with the Bentzin.  I'm looking forward now to shooting more soon with the plate cameras so that I can take advantage of my renewed familiarity with the old folders.  I'm thinking I may use the half-frame mask with the Rada film back so that I can get sixteen shots from the 120 roll.  I would also like to try shooting some sheet film and some glass plates, but I'll need to look for some good advice on getting set up properly for that.

Yerba Mansa

 Summer along the middle Rio Grande is announced by the blooming of the Yerba Mansa.  This year the season started a little early, probably thanks to warm temperatures and some welcome rains.

The dense patches of fleshy green leaves blanket acres of the boggy cottonwood forest floor.  The plants do well in the deep shade, but the blossoms are thickest where a bit of direct sunlight reaches them during the day.

The seed forming flowers are actually the small petals clustered on the central cone structure.  The likely function of the showy white bracts is to attract sphinx moths and other night-roaming pollinators.  In addition to the production of copious amounts of seeds, the plants also spread with dense mats of runners near the soil surface.

While the towering cottonwoods are dominant, they share the space with many other shade-tolerant species including Mulberries, Russian Olive, and Wolf Berries.

These first pictures of the year were made with my Nikon F on TMAX 400 film.  I look forward to visiting the Yerba Mansa several more times as they mature during the summer with other cameras.  I am  also pleased to see that the small Yerba Mansa which I planted a couple years ago beside the house look like they might finally produce a few flowers.

(See: The Yerba Mansa Project)

Ignore this pic.  It is for another post elsewhere.

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