It’s not Direct Positive though. The speed is interesting, but you’re stuck developing it as a paper negative here unless you can source the bleach (standard dichromate/permanganate by the looks of things) as they can’t ship the bleach bits of the kit internationally.
I shoot it at 400 and dev in DDX, or, my personal favourite, shoot at anything between 1250 and 1600 and develop in Diafine. I love the look. Never used it in 120, for some reason I have a pile of older and expired delta and neopan I have to shoot in 120 before I can justify buying a pile of tri-x :-)
Since I came across the original article I’ve been inspired and am watching out for one of those lenses :).
What Sinar shutter/lens board is suitable for the Industar lens? Seems to be a few different types at widely varying
costs around.
None of them are really suitable, they’re intended for Sinar kit, actually they’re meant to be mounted behind the front standard of an F2 I think, or a norma, not too sure which, and then the bellows is attached directly to them, so I’m using it back to front aswell. The lens board is just jimmied up out of mounting board and foamcore, much like the rest of the camera :-)
Those shutters are definately pretty usefull, they open up a whole wealth of shutterless and cheap process lenses that otherwise wouldn’t be terribly useful. I got mine on a really low BIN on ebay, but they can go for quite a bit. They’re all fairly similar, just make sure if you’re buying one to get the cable release. It’s a special one intended just for these shutters, and you can’t use it without them.
for the B&W paper negatives I scanned and inverted. People have used them to contact print onto another sheet of B&W in the darkroom though, yielding a positive print. For the colour RA4 stuff I started off the same route, inverting after scanning, but then started experimenting with reversal processing the prints to get proper positives. This involved an initiial B&W paper developer, then re-exposure, then the RA4 colour developer, then normal bleach/fix. Filtration was a big issue with this.
Trial and error was right :) Not so much the B&W, because that’s proverbially around the 3->6 mark so it’s relaitively easy to work out, but definately the colour stuff. Not many people have done it.
The B&W paper is some really out of date jessops B&W multigrade that I picked up for half price when jessops in dublin closed down. I’d say you’d get much the same effect with any MG paper …
This is very impressive work incl the camera of course. There is a definite 19th century look and feel from the first two.
We have a few folk on the site who like to make their own LF cameras.
I’ll find jb7’s posts in the projects area for you where he’s made a 8×10 and his infamous 4×5 plank.
Thanks, the 19th century feel is probably more from using paper directly as a negative, it has a very ortho response, so very reminiscent of turn of the century photography. Although the 8×10-ness adds to it as well of course. I think I’ve talked to jb7 before on flickr or somewhere, we were trying to track down a cheap source of X-Ray 8×10 film, before I ended up using paper instead.
Initially this was meant to be a working prototype which was going to be transformed into a proper monorail view camera with movements of some description, but having a second child sort of got in the way of that :)
Here are a couple more representative B&W samples …
I also started experimenting with exposing colour RA4 paper negatives …
I got interrupted half way through experimenting with exposing RA4 and then reversal processing it so that I could get proper colour positives straight out of the camera. Fun times !