Portraits with a Copy Camera and Lithographic film

[thomashobbs]

Hi,

My aunt & uncle own a small-town newspaper that still hasn't gone digital. They shoot their layouts on a massive copy-camera with a 15 foot rail that uses a 19" Goertz Apochromatic Red Dot Artar F11 lens.

I'd like to try to shoot portraits on this camera. For conceptual reasons I'd like to use, as much as possible, the same process and materials as they use to produce the paper. My main challenge is that the lithographic film has such a low sensitivity. I ran a few tests and calculated it's ISO at 1.5 [!!].

It seems like I have three options: 1) long exposure, 2) really powerful strobe lights, or 3) find a more sensitive film. I'm leaning towards some combination of #2 and #3.

Regarding finding a more sensitive film, a couple of people have recommended Arista II Ortho Litho film. I've been told if I use HC110 as my developer I can potentially push it a couple of stobs and get an effective ISO of 25. Does any one have any experience with this and can offer any tips or advice about these materials or any others that I might be able to use. I should add that I'd like for the portraits to be the same size as the newspaper which whose pages are 12x22" [Arista II is available in 20x24" and I could cut it down to size]

As for the strobe lights, I calculated that the current film needs about 10,000 ws to be exposed if the lens is wide open [at f11]. I could rent two 4800ws power packs and run it through two or four strobes placed about two feet from my subjects' faces. I'm thinking about doing this but I'm actually concerned about eye damange or heat from the strobes. I'd have my subjects stare at the lens, not the lights, but still, am I asking for trouble?

Obviously if I can get the film to be more senstive then I don't need lights as powerful and everyone's happy [especially my wallet].

Thanks!!

[EdWorkman]

Go to Jim Gali's site for some examples, shot outdoors.
Then go back to some old issues of Darkrrom Techniques for a coupla articles that describe how to get a stop of speed by subjecting the film to vapor from hydrogen peroxide. You could try pre-exposure, then only par-boil your subject, to preserve eyebrows and retinae. You might find that you'll be printing thru fog, but the more you develope the higher the contrast will be anyway. Paper developers tend to give higher contrast than film developers, so it sounds like you are really putting yourself in a box, although you might try extreme dilution and reduced agitation.
Sounds like you have time to experiment, so the most straightforward steps might be:
Pre expose the film.
Use the available developer at very high dilution
Extend development time using very reduced agitation.
There are some good threads here about dilution and agitation, try "semi stand" for one set of keywords.

[BarryS]

There's a fourth option you haven't considered--use a faster lens. Wet plate collodion has (maybe) an ISO of 0.5 and fine portraits are possible with a fast lens and only moderately long (<10 seconds) exposures. A typical Petzval lens has a speed of around f/4, so it's letting in eight times the light of your Artar. Even a slower f/6 Petzval lens is going to open up a lot more portrait options. A Petzval is also going to give a very different look to your portraits--that may or may not be something you want.

[Hal Hardy]

If you think lith film is slow, try lith film with a half tone screen in front of it. We had some slack time one night at the paper and messed around with shooting half tone portraits on the copy camera. I was smart, I manned the dark room. I wanted to use f/22 for DoF and because the lens was optimized for it, but I used f/11 to be nice to the guy being baked by the quartz lamps. The DoF was so shallow that a button on his shirt was tack sharp but the material behind it that it fastened together was soft.

[thomashobbs]

Hal, I think the DoF is a key issue. Shooting at f11 is just too razor thin if, as i'm thinking of doing, I shoot at a 100% reproduction ratio. It seems like I need to use some other material, something faster.

I suppose I could use regular old photographic film. I could use ISO 400 and then really stop down the lens to f45 which I bet will still give me some pretty good bokeh. I could get ultra-large format film or I could just lay the sheets of film in a grid. The back has vaccum suction which holds everything in place. I'd just need to practice in advance since I'd have to do it in total darkness.

I did some googling and came across a similar thread on photo.net asking for advice on using a copy camera. In case anyone google's this thread, here's the link to the other one:

http://photo.net/large-format-photography-forum/00J4r0

[thomashobbs]

Hi,

Just an update to this thread. Depth of field turned out to be the biggest issue. Using a 480cm lens focused to a 1:1 reproduction ratio doesn't give you a lot of leeway. I ended up renting a 2400 watt-second light pack with two heads pointed directly at my [poor] subjects. This allowed me to shoot at f90 and get about 10cm of DoF. I used FP4 because this was the only 12x20" film that i could get at short notice [From Glazer's]. I would've preferred to use HP5. The increase in speed would've allowed me to rent a cheaper, less powerful strobe system. C'est la vie.

btw, here are the results:
http://www.thomaslockehobbs.com/sentinel/

cheers
-t

[Eric Constantineau]

Nice results, very nice, inspiring...

[Jay DeFehr]

With the exception of some unfortunate reflections in your subjects' glasses, your portraits look fantastic! Very well done, under very difficult technical circumstances. Congratulations!

[pound]

wow i enjoyed reading yr blog on the behind the scenes process and also the video. Quite impressed with the way you handle the difficulties faced in the project.

[rjmeyer314]

You don't really need that fast film for portraits, as long as your camera won't vibrate when hand-held. In this case, your camera will be steady. I've had good luck with all kinds of glass plate "films" and x-ray films, etc. My main film for my 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 graflexes is Kodak Electron Image film. I expose it at ASA 10 and develop it in Diafine. The usual film speeds when Graflex cameras first came out were around ASA 8 (according to a magazine article by old photographer who worked before and during the depression). Even Kodak Ektapan, a favorite portrait film of a few years ago, was only ASA 50. I suggest you try a shot or two of the usual film for the camera. Just expose at ASA 10 (to start) and develop in Diafine. Then vary your ASA as needed. The slowest medium I ever used were some Kodak scientific 8x10 glass plates that I found were about ASA 0.01. I exposed it in a view camera for about 10 minutes on a nice summy day, and developed it in Diafine. I got a negative with a good range of densities (and no grain that I could see). The negative plates were of approximately normal contrast. (I was doing landscapes and not portraits with those slow plates).