Bouquets of Flowers from UC Davis on 8x10

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The exposure was 8 seconds wide open (f6.3) on Ilford FP4 Plus (outdated by a couple decades.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 settings weren't working on my Ilex Universal shutter, so I turned on the focus button that opens up the shutter after covering the lens with the darkslide and waiting a few seconds to avoid camera shake. Camera shake is a real issue with this kind of a setup, a long exposure with a wooden camera pointing down! I also had to factor in bellows extension to the exposure, since with 8x10 the image was almost life size on the ground glass.

The 12" (about 305mm) Kodak Commercial Ektar

So the resulting negative was a bit dense, but looked good. Here's a quick and dirty inversion from my mobile phone:

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