Hi !
My name is Grimm and together with my wife Suvi , we have discovered a new love in our life , large format photography !
For some years , we are fooling around as amateurs with a modern canon eos 60d .
In the past i used to have a old minolta camera that was incredibly charming , but as that one broke , non-digital photography got a little forgotten by us i must admit ..
That was until last summer , when on a holiday in Madrid , we saw a woman on the streets taking pictures and developing them on the spot with a Kamra-e-faoree , also know as the Afghan Box Camera. For those who aren't familiar with this type of 'instant' camera , its a very basic 4x5 camera and development room in one .
After some searching , i found this beautiful project website made by Lukas Birk and Sean Foley: http://www.afghanboxcamera.com/
Following the manual provided on that website , we have been building our own afghan box camera and we are able to take nice and sharp b&w negatives.
As a lens , i obtained a Ilex 210mm f5.6 Acu-Symmetrical.
For a portrait picture , it seems to work best if the subject is 2-3 meters away , as its possible to properly focus and frame the picture on this distance.
The issue we are still struggling with , where i am hoping your tremendous combined expertise could help us out , is to take good positives from the negatives.
With the current lens and setup , i cannot take a positive from the negative that covers the 4x5 paper .
If i focus on the negative , i have a image on the focus plate of 2x3cm , if i try to enlarge that image , it will become too blurry to distinguish anything.
I have been trying all kind of different distances between lens and negative picture and internal focus plate , i just can't get it right
When we saw the woman in madrid take the positive , she would attach a negative holder before the lens , on a distance of around 30-50cm (not sure exactly) , and so do the photographers documented on the afghan box camera website.
Does anyone have any idea what i am doing wrong ? I would think it is an issue of lens specification ?
There must be a way to take positives the same size or slightly smaller as the negative . Currently we are making contact prints at home from our negatives , but as its an 'instant camera' , it would be nice to not rely on a dark room
Greetings
Grimm
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