It’s that quiet time of year just after Christmas when not much is going on and the light is only around for short parts of the day. So it seemed like a good time to break out the Intrepid Large Format camera and spend some quality time with a bunch of flowers.
As you can see from the following photos , the setup was very simple with just my trusty black velvet offcut draped over a clothes horse and table in front of a bright window. The Intrepid sat on my old and very solid Manfrotto tripod and I used a blanket to cover my head (as my velvet offcut was in use for the background!). And yes, you do need to hide under a cloth to focus the image on the rear ground glass of the camera - the picture is faint and barely visble in sunlight. The third image shows the view you get on the back of the camera - it’s inverted and upside down - you can imagine how hard that makes it to compose your image.
The following three images are some of the Instax Wide instant film images I took with the Intrepid and the LomoGraflok instant back. I hope that you can see that the pictures have a slightly dreamy quality and although the instant film can’t catch anywhere near the sharpness you can get from the camera with transparent film, the pictures have something about them that makes the process worthwhile. Also, they’re a unique ‘thing’ you can hold and look at within a few minutes of taking the picture, which is something special in the days of digital!
The final three images are digital photos taken in the same session, which I’ve processed in Lightroom. Whether these are ‘better’ or just differnet is really up to the viewer!

What seems a very long time ago, I spotted a curious little thing that Lomo were offering that would fit on the back of our Intrepid Large Format Camera: a Polaroid style back for instant film!
I thought it might be fun to be able to get instant results from photoshoots, so joined the kickstarter and waited.
Then the pandemic hit, so I waited some more!

Finally, just recently we received a package containing a nondescript black plastic box, shown here attached to the camera:

The process of taking a photo is even more of a faff than the film process we’ve documented previously on this blog! Once you have the camera set up and focussed, you place the back on the camera and then take the photo.
You then have to remove the back (I think this is an Intrepid thing - if you leave it on the back, the clip you can see in the picture scratches the photo as it ejects) and press the button to eject the photo:

We tried this out on a recent maternity shoot and it’s great fun and helped get us all in to the right mood for the digital shots. It’s really lovely to all gather round and watch the picture appear as if by magic.
The pictures you get from this system can be very charming, but they are nowhere near the quality you can get from film in this camera or from our Fuji digital kit, but they are a unique instant memento and have a very different look to them. We’ll definitely be using it lots in the future.