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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  The camera setup for the shot in our dining room The exposure was 8 seconds wide open (f6.3) on Ilford FP4 Plus (outdated by a couple decades.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

Recently I've acquired a few Linhof cameras. I got a 5x7 view camera from Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale. Later I stumbled upon a Color Kardan 90 Jahre Jubalaeum edition on Craigslist. And more recently, I found a "baby Technika" 2x3 (6x9) at Oakland's East Bay Depot for Creative Re-use. Not knowing much about Linhof large format cameras, I tried getting more info online, and came across a strange thread on the Large Format Photography Forum . Basically on this thread various Linhof owners ask a guy named Bob Salomon what year their Linhof was made. And the thread is over 100 pages long! Sifting through that thread is mindnumbing. Why Bob doesn't just publish the list of serial numbers is beyond me. Maybe it's just nice to feel needed. So I started compiling a spreadsheet of the serial numbers and the answer Bob gives. If you don't feel like spending a couple days reading this thread to get a hint as to the age of your Lin

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

The use of Rodinal is most common with Semistand Development. I've been playing with Semistand development on and off for a while with the more common Rodinol. Yesterday I gave HC110 a try. And I liked it. Dilution: (from syrup): 1:120 Temperature: unmeasured Prewash: time unrecorded (maybe 5 minutes) Time: 40 minutes Inversion: first 30 seconds or so, then one more time roughly 20 minutes (half way) into development Equipment used: My old trusty JOBO 4x5 drum, Kodak HC-110 (duh!), Lauder fix, lots of water Film(s): these show only Fomapan (Arista.edu) 4x5 samples, but the exact same shots were done with outdated Agfapan 100, Kodak Plus-X Pan, and Tri-X professional (320) Camera: Toyo (Omega) 45d with Fuji Fujinon 250mm f6.3 and Caltar IIn (Rodenstock Sironar N) 150mm f5.6 Scanner: Epson V700 All in all, I was quite happy with the results. Density of negatives was pretty good. I actually shot two of each motif on four different types of films and processed t