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Mother's day was coming up and my daughter Ella has been working on a farm at University of California Davis. Ella has been bringing home some wonderful bouquets - and once again she brought home a gorgeous arrangement for her mom. Bouquet of flowers as seen through the cell phone camera Since getting a couple of reels from 20th Century Camera,  I've been itching to shoot more 8x10 and 5x7 film. They have a reel that fits four 8x10 films that fits in my exiting JOBO drum . Since testing on a Unidrum roller, it looks like this reel is real good (punny?!) Closeup of the 3d printed reel from 20th Century Camera My grandfather "Hal" (Milton or M Halberstadt) gave me an (even back then old) Burke & James 8x10 camera, and I broke that out along with a 12" Kodak Commercial Ektar to take one shot of the bouquet.  The camera setup for the shot in our dining room The exposure was 8 seconds wide open (f6.3) on Ilford FP4 Plus (outdated by a couple decades. The B and T

Anybody shooting large format film today knows that film is extraordinarily expensive. A sheet of 8x10" black & white film will run anywhere from $3 to $10. Those interested in ultra large format photography have come up with various ways of shooting on a budget: paper negatives, lith film, and X-ray film. X-ray film costs anywhere from $.50 to $2/8x10" sheet. When you first think of X-ray film, you might imagine a film capable of seeing through surfaces. But get your mind out of the gutter! For the conventional photographer, X-ray film has some quirks. But if anything those quirks limit what the film sees, not expands. X-ray films typically are orthochromatic. Much like films in the really olden days, they are not sensitive to the red spectrum. For your photography, that means a really red rose will look blackish. For portraiture, that means that freckles and zits will look darker than they do, so keep that in mind. A big plus to orthochromatic films is that they c