We had a family shoot towards the end of October and as we were preparing to finish we asked if they would be happy to pose long enough for us to try out our Intrepid large format camera. They were very keen! When the camera emerged from the car they were all extremely curious and wanted to get under the dark cloth and have a look at the screen to see what we saw.
The image you get on the back, as you’re focussing the camera, is upside down and reversed, which makes framing the image quite interesting!
When you add that you can’t just ‘click a button’ and get a picture, the whole thing becomes much more of an event than using a digital camera.
Here’s the rough process, to give you an idea of the time it all takes:
Arrange everyone in the frame. There’s no zoom and everything is cumbersome and on a tripod, so this involves moving people and camera around a lot…which you’ll see we didn’t quite get right!
Get under the dark cloth and focus the image.
Get a meter reading (we cheated and used one of our Fuji cameras)
Set the Aperture and shutter speed.
Realise people have moved, so refocus the image.
Notice a cloud has covered the sun, so take another meter reading and change the settings!
Manually cock the shutter - this is priming a spring that will open and close the shutter for a set time when you eventually get to press it!
Close the shutter - you have to do this manually and if you forget you will expose the film when you remove the dark slide at step 10 and get no picture.
Insert the film holder (you can’t do this before as it goes in front of the focussing screen and blocks your view).
Remove the dark slide.
Get everyone to smile…while noticing the cloud has moved so the light has changed!
Press the shutter button.
Replace the dark slide.
Remove the film holder.
This process happens for each shot, and takes a while! Weirdly though, it’s such a performance that the family posed really well and it’s about the only time we got them all to hold still and smile at the same time!
Of course, we had no idea if we’d managed to actually capture anything on our 4 shots, so off we went to process the film.
Result!
Of the four shots, we got one dud, which we think was because the shutter was cocked but not closed, and two that are a bit too contrasty because the light changed before we took the picture.
Overall though, we’re happy with the results on this first trial. Next time, we’ll definitely spend more time posing and hopefully less time in the process of taking the image!
