I've had two Calumet LF cameras for some time, but until recently was not recovered enough from Achilles tendon surgery (last November...) to take a long walk with a large camera, tripod, and 14 film backs. THe biggest mystery is where I even got 14 film backs. I remember buying three.
Anyway, I'm still working out some technical kinks in the digitization. I'm using my DSLR and taking 35+- photos of each negative and stitching them together in Photoshop. This has worked well, in general, but some lighting difficulties have left odd tones on some digital files that don't exist on the negatives. I selected this method because it's faster and slightly less work than using a scanner and, when it works, it yields very finely detailed images since the DSLR sensor can record individual film grains. And individual dust particles. Oh, and that slight crescent where the hypo didn't get all the hard water minerals off.
I also used about 3.5ml too much Ilfosol 3 in my 1+14 solution and developed for about 20 seconds too long (at a degree or two too warm), so the negatives were harder than I've had in a LONG time. Interestingly, the Lucky brand film I did in the batch before with the same technique turned out well.
I have a couple of images that turned out well and that I managed to digitize with some competence, so here are some of my first 4X5 shots.
These stone remnants are, I'm told, a smokehouse. It was built into the creek side along Marsh Creek in Brentwood, California. Now on public land, it's easy to find in the Round Valley Regional Park. The park is also a semi-scenic spot with great birding potential, including golden eagle sightings in the park.
For this, I put substantial swing on the front and back to isolate the doorway. Movements are VERY new to me having only used them before on a prototype P/C lens I made for my Pentax DSLR out of an old 75mm Fuji tessar and a bag bellows I made from hand-stitched dark cloth.
Please ignore the blending artifacts in the sky. I'm still working that out. You should see how badly the first of these lot turned out, in terms of digitization, though.
I managed to use this lens at every marked aperture as well as the smallest unmarked opening (which I think is about f165.) It performed really well across the spectrum and the DoF at 6.3 and 8 were beautifully shallow on head-on shots.
Comments are welcome. I need to reduce the negatives in the next few weeks and re-digitize them to see if I can obtain better image results, though.
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