Chopping a derelict Ford…

[Ken Hamilton]

Fuzzy or not, we get the picture...........
Thanks for documenting this project, Paul

[Philip Smith]

Nice project Paul & some cool tools!  Are the fires out?

Philip

[RoughboyModelworks]

Not sure if the fire is out Phil but it wasn't anywhere nearby, which is a good thing. The fire was quite a ways south of us and because of peculiar wind and climate conditions, the smoke was blowing up the valley along the west side of the mountains. We had smoke until Tuesday night. Fire is the one thing we're always on the lookout for up here.

Paul

[JohnP]

Goodness an 8x10. Did you ever use color transparencies in it? I have a 1942 ViewGraphic 4x5. I haven't had it out in a year or two but I keep threatening to do so. Film and processing are getting expensive, plus favorite films are disappearing.  Looking on Shorpy at the old Kodachrome 4x5s and seeing the unbelievable rich colors of 50+ year old K transparencies makes me wonder what the heck were they thinking when they stopped production. Digital is for snapshooters, but it is handy for article shots and the like.

It is always nice to see your work. It is natural you'd have used a big camera or two.

John

[RoughboyModelworks]

John: Yes I was sorry to see the demise of Kodachrome too. I have one SLR left that I used to like to use on occasion with Kodachrome, but it will be pretty much a relic now. I only shot a few transparencies in 4x5, almost all the work I was doing was in B&W. There's a real magic to an 8x10 BW contact print that you just can't recreate any other way. I used to selenium tone my prints too and the tonal range was just incredibly rich. I had the opportunity to use a Sinar 4x5 for a summer... that was a treat. I owned an old Kodak 5x7 too for a number of years until it became almost impossible to find film. The largest view camera I used was an old portrait 11x14 when I was at the Eastman House. I had a small studio set up in one of the basement vaults and would take portraits of friends and visiting photographers. One of my favourite shots is of J. H. Lartigue who was quite a charming man. I still have those negatives filed away, interesting documents.

Paul

[artizen]

Completely off topic but hey that's a good thing when we talk about Sinars!!!! I owned a 4x5 with about four lenses and many doubledarks, a 6x9cm rollfilm back and the classic photo grey case for metering. Those were the days. Sold it at my new wife's insistence to put a deposit on our first new house. Still suffer withdrawal symptoms whenever I grab the Lumix to take a shot. Mind you, the Sinar never took HD video either!

For modelling, the new breed of compact do-everything cameras are perfect for documenting the evolving life of a new layout but the old film cameras recorded history with a level of detail that is still lacking (until you reach about 24 megapixels). But I think a Seitz 617 is over the top for layout photography (at 160 megapixels). Drool.

Hijack over. Rant over. My photography as I knew it is over.

[JohnP]

Oh heck Ian, keep the hijack going for a bit. We all can weep over the loss of big film. What do people think made the old LIFE and National Geographics so great? All those Speed Graphics the press used too. I mean they got the shots, didn't they? It was all art back then. We have in Roanoke VA the O Winston Link museum, with his Graphic View cameras on display. Sure, it was set-up photography, but still try to reproduce that with digital today. Plus the shear pleasure of making an image with all the set-up time and calculations vs. just taking a picture.

Paul, you have been around haven't you? The only B&W work I ever did was at a job making laser interferometry images and holograms on red-sensitive 4x5 glass technical plates, plus a little 35mm roll film. That meant no light at all in the darkroom until developing was done. My second day on the job as an electronics technician the scientist handed me several plates in a box, said "These are electron microscope images, they cost $1000 each, please develop them, go see Bob in the darkroom." Then he walked away. Man was it DARK in there. I learned to lightly touch my lips to a plate to see what side the emulsion was on. But I got them done.

John

[artizen]

OK - just one more small hijack then!!! I still have my Speed Graphic from the days when I owned a portrait studio. The Speed Graphic was used by the original owner as his passport photo camera. I sold all the Mamiya 6x7 stuff and the studio camera stand. Still got the light troughs in the roof of the garage and all the old signage from the business. My Sinar was my pride and joy but I went on to Nikon F4s and now a Nikon D200 plus a Lumix. The only thing I really miss is the ability to shoot really long exposures (meaning several hours if necessary) otherwise the digital stuff is getting better - just in a different direction. I think if we saw the quality being produced by the really high end digital cameras such as Hasselblad and Sinar and Seitz 617 we would see that the capability of capturing detail is there - just the price is out of reach. But for capturing day-by-day blow-by-blow layout build history then the Lumix is just fine. Plus I can put it in my pocket and go on holiday and shoot HD video of the kids on the beach. Don't know if I could quite squeeze the Sinar into my pocket or even get it into the layout to take photos either. But swing and tilt and shift certainly made extreme depth of field supremely easy to deal with. I might still have the Sinar wax pencil somewhere as well.

OK - hijack over now.

[RoughboyModelworks]

Paul, you have been around haven't you?

Yes John, I have been around the block a couple of times...

No worries about hijacking the thread Ian. Photography is an old love. I got rid of the last of my larger format gear about 12 years ago... traded my last Hassy for my first Nikon digital camera. Kinda miss the Hassy but for 99% of the photo work I do now, digital is just fine. I once took the Sinar 4x5 on vacation with me with a stack of film holders and a changing bag so I could unload and reload the film holders every night for the next day's shooting. One thing I liked about it that Dave alluded to, was the discipline it took to take a shot... a lot of setup time, multitude of adjustments, waiting for just the right moment, then the darkroom work at sometime later. You couldn't (at least I couldn't) afford to waste any film so every shot had to count. That discipline has proved very valuable in my other pursuits and I still take a long time to take my photographs, even with the digital camera. I guess once it becomes ingrained, you never lose it. Gotta admit, I do miss f64 though...

Paul