[LargeFormat] Holiday Snapping

[Stein]

Dear Nephew Clive,

     The list is not dead and neither are the participants. Your Olde Uncle
has spent a glorious Easter break with the large format camera in the studio
while his neighbors have been busy uprooting trees and weeding flower beds.
The whole street seems in a frenzy of yard tidying - one maniac has even
bought a leaf blower and is cleaning the street gutter. My contribution to
it all is to put the door back onto the '62 De Soto that is up on concrete
blocks on the front lawn. That and turn the scrap rubber tyre pile over.

    My subject has been a young woman who says she is a witch and wants to
be photographed using elemental colours - red, blue, green, yellow, etc. We
did red this weekend - apparently it is associated with fire and the sun and
suchlike - I had to make a sun in the studio. Boy, you need a lot of space
for a decent sun, not to mention the scorch marks. I am going to opt for an
outdoor shoot when it comes to blue and water. I figure we can hold her
under with a pole long enough to get a good time exposure. I hope there are
no hammerheads....

    The other discovery in the studio was how to copy large portraits
through mottled glass to give an impressionistic feel to the picture. I know
this is probably duck soup for the Photoshoppers and there are no end of
pushbuttons that reel Monets out of a printer, but I do it optically.

    I have discovered that with the Linhof secured on the Gitzo tripod I can
extend one of the legs backwards like a machine gun tripod and suspend the
tilt head and camera a long way out there in front. I put a sandbag on the
extended rear leg. The effect of this is to give an unimpeded view
vertically downward to the floor where the picture to be copied is placed.
As luck would have it my studio floor is black and white Nelson chequer and
it is easy to focus and line up the prints down there. The field of view of
the 150mm lens is perfect for an 11 x 14 print on 4 x 5 film. If I want to
recopy an 8 x 10 print it can be economically done on the 6 x 7 Super Rollex
back.

    The trick with optical impressionism seems to be to have a clear dull
day sending neutral light in through the glass doors and suspend a sheet of
mottled glass above the print. I use little wooden blocks or soup cans.
Putting the glass sheet further from the print increases the size of the
blotches and putting it close makes the effect of fine brushwork. You can
suspend the glass with different blocks to tilt it and this gives  different
areas of the print different-sized brushstrokes. Next time I do it I am
going to divide the exposure into 4's and tilt the sheet in between the
exposures to see what that does.

     The negs are drying as I type and should be fun to print tomorrow.

     Now - your turn. What did you do this weekend?

     Uncle Dick