If you're shooting film and not making proper proof contact sheets, you really should be. I've shot film for more than 40 years but I've only consistently made proper proofs for the past few. For a good while, I shot and developed my film, then scanned it and used the scans to choose and images to print in the darkroom (with the added bonus that I had the scanned images to use online).
A few years back, a Mac OS update made my Epson Perfection V750 scanner the definition of tedium to use...pausing after every single image it scans so that a roll of film can take half an hour or more to scan....
I've seen a lot of pictures shot with the Speed Graphic/Aero Ektar aerial reconnaissance lens combination that I really like so I've had it in the back of my mind that one day I would get one. Two things put me off: firstly the fact that the Aero Ektars are radioactive (some reports suggest dangerously so) and secondly that the price of the lens is now, frankly, ridiculous, frequently topping £700 on e-bay.
Just before Christmas I was browsing antique stalls in my local market when I spotted what was clearly not an Aero Ektar, but was some sort of World War II aerial reconnaissance lens. The seller...
I’ve had an old 1950s Ilford Sporti camera sitting at the back of my cupboard for some years now. It came out of a relative’s attic and, despite having a sticking shutter, was given to me because I’m ‘interested in cameras’. I’d always intended to convert it for pinhole use, but never got around to it. I was slightly put off because a Google search brought up only one description of a similar conversion in which apparently knowledgeable people claimed that the camera was ‘never meant to come apart’ and required brute force and a chisel to dismantle. Not a great starting point...
I’ve said before that my photography is influenced by the earliest purveyors of the medium: the Victorian and Edwardian studio photographers who shot nudes and historical reconstructions to peddle as “artists’ aids”, used as an alternative to life models. For obvious reasons, many of the original buyers had never held a paintbrush in their life! Considered pornographers in their time, the images they produced would today be considered moderate in the extreme. But recreating the look and feel of these photographs is a challenge.
There are many aspects to replicating this early...