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Two recent books have stirred my interest in exploring the variety of affordable vintage cameras that can still be used. The books are: – Retro Cameras: The Collector’s Guide to Vintage Film Photography by John Wade.   – Discovering Old Cameras, 1839-1939 by Robert White This then led to exploring some of the discussion forums dedicated to vintage cameras – some just dedicated to a single manufacturer. One helpful website was Emulsive on here is a comparison of three foldable cameras – one of which I have now bought – the German made – Agfa Record III. For under £100 on Ebay this came with its leather case, a flashgun, yellow filter and lens hood. Listed as “all appears to be working, but not tested with film”. When it arrived, the focus ring was seized, but with some patience a lot of force and the nearest dribble of WD40 it has freed up nicely. This is a landscape format camera – taking a negative that is 9x6cm. This can be done with a 120 roll film – yielding 8 frames. However, I have a lot of pieces of X-ray film which I have now cut to 9x6cm. So my first test involved putting a single piece of film in the camera and closing the back. Using the App “Light Meter” on my phone I measured for exposure using 100ISO for the blue x-ray film and took a few sample shots of the garden. As can be seen from the example below (photo of negative projected by enlarger and inverted to become positive, focus and exposure are good, but there is a flash of brightness – probably from a pinhole in the bellows. I put an LED light inside the bellows in a dark room and soon found 3 small holes. These will be dealt with – using flexible adhesive mixed with black pigment. – that’ll be in the next blog…… Other sites to explore Matt’s Classic Cameras Photojottings #Agfa #bellows #folding

The Blog writing has been on the back burner whilst I spent time refurbishing my two 1900s, mahogany and brass bellows camera. The Boots camera is a single-rack camera and less useful so I decided to refurbish this one keeping it as original as possible. The Hora camera is slightly more modern by 10 -20 years and has a double rack and pinion adjustment making it much more useable since focussing can be accomplished without changing the distance between the lens and the object. This Hora camera then was to be refurbished to make it as useable as possible. Each camera was stripped down, as far as possible, to its component parts. The brass was in a badly corroded state in many places. The worst was treated to a light sanding with 600 wet&dry then polished with a cream cleaner. After completing the first camera my fingers hurt so I purchased a battery powered Dremel to do the buffing. However this new Dremel was dreadfully underpowered and stalled with the lightest pressure at the slow and medium speeds. After finishing the cleaning using the high speed only I returned the Dremel to Amazon who refunded me fully. As the pictures show the bellows of the newer, Hora camera have had a lot of bookbinding tape applied to cover light leaks. I bought, from a supplier in China, replacement bellows and glued them in place with flexible adhesive. Whilst the new bellows are fully light tight they are less stiff that the original and sag quite a bit. To address this I have attached a brass ring to the middle section of the bellows and use a tensioning wire to hold the bellows up. This is a period feature on some other cameras of this type. The Boots camera had its glass screen cleaned with 1200 grit wet&dry carborundum paper. I still haven’t removed all the marks, but the glass is much clearer in use. It does still need new bellows but I want to locate a leather type to look more original than the Chinese polyester version. Both cameras have now been completed. because of the cleaning and lubricating graphite, are much easier to use. and I have taken some very pleasing images with them since the refurbishments, an example of which is below. More images to follow in my next blog. #camera #largeformat #bellows #ThorntonPickard #antique

It has been a very busy April/May – preparing 75 pieces for North Somerset Artsweek #nsaw2019 – but so worth it! We have had a great response from visitors to the Clevedon Theatre Shop venue, in terms of numbers, purchases and (more importantly) conversations. Just today and tomorrow to go then time for a rest. A successful first lino-cut in a short taster-workshop. #nsaw2019

Captured a few images today with the 1900s Hora half-plate camera on X-ray film – scanned and inverted. Just learning what iso this film is – about 50. And learning what speed the Thompson Pickard shutter is actually operating at – 1/125s #xray

It has been a busy few weeks preparing for North Somerset ArtsWeek in May. I am exhibiting at The Theatre Shop, Clevedon BS21 6HX. #NSAW19 @NSomersetArts northsomersetarts.org More of this later….. Meanwhile I wanted to spend some time enjoying the drama that is the North Devon Coastline. No better place than Hartland Quay – and so it proved. A two night stay at The Hartland Quay Hotel (recommended) gave me the time to view the cliffs and sea in a variety of light and weather conditions. A mix of paper negatives and x-ray film was used. The X-ray film exposure times have been tricky to work out – I am still experimenting. Anything from 1/125s (using the Thompson Pickard shutter) and 2 seconds have yielded images, but the longer times do seem over-exposed on processing. I have some more work to do on the images and will post later. #alternative #NSAW19 #NSomersetArts

Taking the opportunity to stay a few days at Skipton this week, I packed the VW Camper with my “new” 1900s Hora bellows camera and basic dark-room gear and headed into the countryside – enjoying the challenges of photographing in the snow. With such bright – but high contrast scenes it was always going to be a challenge to get any kind of image on the paper negative. Even with the paper at ISO 6,  F45 still only have me a 2 to 4 second shutter speed. So I used the Thornton Pickard shutter with the “time” setting and held it open with an air bulb for a count of up to 4 seconds. Photographing waterfalls was a similarly challenging exercise – again a high contrast subject. This time the light level was lower allowing for a longer, and hence proportionally more accurate timing of the, exposure. Here was a good place to compare the two lens types I now have. A wide angle 5inch ? F6.4-22 Apem Asymmetrical and a standard 8 inch F8-45 Beck Symmetrical. I am very happy with the images from both of these lenses though the wide angle image was over-exposed – only working with a 2 second exposure at f22. I had pre-flashed the paper negatives before setting out on this trip and am happy to report a much improved dynamic range as a result. I think the images are really atmospheric – they draw you in to explore, to see and discern detail. The hyper-reality, hyper-clarity of many modern digital images leaves no mystery – you see the image and quickly forget it. But an image that you have to work with a bit lingers more in the memory and invites you to fill in the hidden/un-revealed detail. You finish the story of the image – so you have an investment in the image – start to form a relationship with the image- the subject – the photographer. #Skipton #Cray #Malham #yorkshire #NationalPark #Snow #Waterfall #dales

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/make-a-mess-tickets-56035951038 Saturday 9th March in Weston High Street, I’ll be there offering the opportunity to try Aluminium etching of a photograph. The photograph can be one we provide or one of your own – even a selfie! This is about making something permanent from the type of image that’s typically quickly forgotten or passed over. It’s about slowing down the image making process – taking 30 minutes – if we are investing that amount of time in an image we will think more carefully about the image’s significance.

I added a second plate camera (By Hora & Co – Wandsworth London 1902-1930) to my collection recently and it came with a Thornton Pickard Shutter. This worked Ok for half a dozen shots, but then broke whilst I was photographing my favourite Exmoor trees (see pic above). The problem was with the shutter curtain which is made of rubberised silk and had perished. Thankfully shutter curtain mertial can be bought from a supplier in Japan for just £16 including delivery. I have also benefitted from reading how to dissassemble and re-assemble a shutter on Paul Wins’ website. Currently the shutter is in pieces whilst I wait for the delivery of the new shutter material. I have laid out the shutter pieces and stuck them to a piece of paper to measure for the new piece. The beauty of working with these cameras is the relative ease with which they can be repaired and adjusted using simple tools and materials. #shutter

Another useful tip from an online forum – to reduce the contrast of a photo paper negative, the advice is to “pre-flash” it with a short exposure to an enlarger light. I don’t have an enlarger so have rigged a small desk light with a couple of sheets of tracing paper over the shade and then added a filter holder and for the flashing added a number 9 Ilford magenta filter. Pre-Flashing the paper for 0.5 to 1.0 s seems to have given an improvement in tonality for the images. To test the process, I deliberately chose a high contrast picture – dark soil and white, sun-lit, crocus flower. First – without flashing Second- with.

With 5×7 sheet film being expensive, at over £1 a sheet, I have been looking for alternatives. I love the look paper negatives give to some images and so will continue to use paper as “film” for some subjects – particularly those that don’t move … In searching discussion forums on alternative photographic processes, I came across questions and advice about using x-ray film. Working out at around 10p a sheet this looked almost too good to be true – but it works  … and it looks great! The film is described as being “sensitive to green light” so I wondered if, like photopaper it would render reds as black, but that is not the case. There is quite a good tonal range as the print below shows. #alternative #film #processes #xray

Having learned how to set the exposure on the 100 year-old Thornton Pickard I have been working on getting everything well-focussed. The challenge with focussing for a still life like this is the depth-of-field is shallow beacuse the camera is so close to the subject. To maximise the depth of field I set the f-stop to its maximum of f64. As a result of this small aperture little light gets to the film, so I needed a long exposure of 7 minutes. #Stilllife

With the sun out and the roads passable, I ventured up onto the top of the Mendip Hills with the Thornton Pickard and some film cartridges loaded with Photopaper as paper-negatives. I also loaded the VW Campervan with the darkroom chemicals, trays and red-light so I could process on site to check exposure. This proved vital as the first set of images – though at maximum aperture of F8 were still underexposed with the shutter operating at 1/30s and the paper’s ISO equivalent of 6. So I went to the other end of the F scale – 64. this gave an exposure time of 4s – long enough to cover minor discrepancies in my manual timing. These shots were much better exposed, though the paper negatives – having been loaded in the not-so-light-tight van were a bit fogged in places. I am pleased with the results – here are scans of the contact prints made from the paper negatives. Some images show a curved shadow at the bottom – a problem with the bellows sagging caused this. I lifted the lens mount and this reduced the problem. Really I need to fit new bellows – but as the rest of the camera is a bit worn it wouldn’t make economic sense compared to buying another in better condition. #mendip #film