Another 4×5 Experiment

Sooke RiverThese are the “lost” images that I was referencing on twitter the other day. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they eventually made it home. The thing is, I loaded the film in hopes of shooting it in the summer of 2010. I then traveled down to Australia and New Zealand without the film, came home, made it through the rest of winter and then rediscovered it. I couldn’t remember what I had loaded. ISO, film type, colour, black and white, negative, positive, none of it was ringing a bell. Since I only had 2 speeds of film I averaged that it would be about 300 ISO and started my guessing there. You see, with my 4×5 camera that I built out of wood, I don’t know quite what the field of view is. So I have to guess. I do know that the aperture is somewhere around f/216. I also know that my light meter works, so I can tell what the exposure time will be at f/16. Taking that into account, I use this handy chart that I made to calculate my exposure time for the pinhole.

As you can see, as soon as it’s about an f/8 day, I’m up to a 5 second exposure on the camera. Approximately, that is. I also find I have to be a lot more selective with my choice of composition because of that whole guessing my field of view thing. It worked out well in the end. And, not to toot my own horn, but they were pretty well educated guesses.
Sooke RiverWhat are your thoughts? Comment below.

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2 comments

  1. Love the pictures and impressed that it they’re from a homemade camera. Can’t wait to look through your previous posts to see more samples and if you talk about the camera more. Thanks!

  2. Thanks Dave,

    There are a couple of images on here from my homemade camera, it’s mostly digital with a few 35mm film shots though!

    Cheers,
    Matthew

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