[LargeFormat] Holiday Snapping

[Clive Warren]

At 20:56 12/04/2004 +0800, Stein wrote:
>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

Dear Uncle Dick,

Well it sounds as though your Easter break was a bit more fun than mine. 
I'm sure you don't want to hear about the attempt to clear out the 
darkroom......

I hope that your witch was of the white variety. I had a similar 
opportunity to photograph a white witch a while back. Maybe I should follow 
it up but I was a little disinclined because of the philosophical pagan 
discussions that inevitably resulted when we met :-)

Great to hear that you are using the optical approach for your 
impressionist photos - let us know how the prints turn out.

Cheers,
             Clive