Highly recommend a Burke & James Rembrandt camera.lens boards measure 8" x 8". "Ample size for big lenses" as in my 1961 B&J catalog puts it. Had one and removed the gray paint to uncover #1 maple? hardwood which I was easily able to stain.
Highly recommend a Burke & James Rembrandt camera.lens boards measure 8" x 8". "Ample size for big lenses" as in my 1961 B&J catalog puts it. Had one and removed the gray paint to uncover #1 maple? hardwood which I was easily able to stain.
Thanks all for the support.
I'd like to start with wet plate, but I'm also interested in LF film. With collodion I'll do mostly portraits in my home studio, but with film I think I'll want to go out, shoot people, architecture, my family etc. That's what I do with digital, and although it's much easier and cheaper, I want so badly to go into LF.
Do you think Graflex Super D would be a good start to cover both wet plates and film? And I'll probably need two lenses, one for portraits and one wider for everything else.
A Graflex Super D would work for wet plate. One advantage that it will have is that as opposed to most view cameras, it is an SLR which will allow to see exactly what you are shooting as you shoot it rather than having to focus, load the holder, remove the darkslide, etc. This may be a more familiar shooting process for you if you have never done any LF work before and may allow you to refine your collodion technique a bit without worrying about learning the view camera process as well.
It will have disadvantages as well. The first is that you will be limited to 4x5 (or smaller if you use a smaller model), and will need to invest in a new camera if you ever decide to move larger. The second is that it has an inherently limited bellows, so you may not be able to use all the lenses that you want, and larger, heavier lenses typically used with a lot of collodion work, especially portrait work, will likely be out of the question due to a smaller lens board (4"x4") and a front standard that is not terribly strong. For example, I use a Dallmeyer pentac 8" lens (brass version) on my very similar Series D, and it is very close to the limit in terms of size and weight the camera can handle. While by no means a "small" lens, it is not terribly large compared to many lenses used for wet plate.
Sounds like quite a big limitation with the lens choice. As a portrait photographer I usually shoot with 75 or 90mm on my full frame camera, which would be equivalent to 250-300mm on 4x5, which is pretty big for Super D, I'd say?
I liked the portability of this camera. Although I'm going to shoot mostly in my home studio, I'll probably go out with it sometimes. Is there any other 4x5 small camera that does't have this bellows limitation, or it's always the case and only the bigger cameras have longer bellows?
I get quite nice results with my RB Series D and either a Kodak No.33 Anastigmat 7 1/2" (190mm) lens or Dallmeyer 8" Pentac with both film and collodion, but that is working within what I know the camera limitations to be. I don't think you would be able to get away with anything much longer than the pentac, though I have only ever used these 2 lenses on it. It is a great camera for what it is, and I love mine when the situation calls for it, but despite being very portable it is not very versatile, whereas a regular view camera may not be nearly as portable, but will be much more versatile. Neither one is wrong. As I said, I love both of mine, but I choose the one I need to create the image I want at the time, and I think that is what you will need to do. Decide what factors are most important (format size, camera size, portability, versatility, bellows/lens limitations, cost, etc) and choose the camera that fits those needs best.
Yeah, eventually you end up with more than one camera. I have 3 digital cameras and each has a different purpose and I won't be able to capture all I captured with just one of them.
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