So it’s Monday night now. That means I made hit through my Japanese quiz and oral presentation thing this morning. Amazingly, everything went fairly well. Well, the quiz went very well, I got a perfect score on the second composition (that was returned today, too), and I don’t think the oral presentation thing went *badly* or anything. I can’t really tell, which is the odd thing. I thought it went horribl, but Kono-sensei was very positive about it. Maybe she was just being nice. We’ll see.
Anyhow, since I didn’t get to go to the darkroom today to mount my prints as I had planned (my B&H delivery didn’t get here until like 4:00), I now find myself with a little free time. It feels so nice to just sit around and do a few things that I want to do, rather than work myself ragged on some stupid school-related project. Of course, I *should* be working on things like my philo paper tonight, and maybe a little later I’ll do a little reading for it, but for the moment, I’m content to just do nothing.
You’ll notice there’s a picture of me at the top of today’s entry. This was taken of me by my friend Joel in the spring of my junior year. Note that I had hair at that point and had not yet decided that I preferred it short. Anyhow, the point here isn’t me, it’s the camera. That camera is a Deardorff 8×10 WFS, circa 1935. I bought it when I was a senior in high school, and it might possibly be the single best thing I’ve ever bought in my life. It has done more for my personal exploration and enjoyment of photography, and heck even growth as a person, than you might suspect an old wooden camera would be capable of.
I paid about $750 for the camera, 4 film holders, and three lensboards. I think the guy selling it to me sold it for less because I was a student and he wanted to see it go to a good home, which was absolutely wonderful of him. For the sake of reference, even a beater ‘Dorff usually goes for at least $1,200 USD without any extras, so I got one hell of a deal. Anyway, when I got it the finish on the wood looked like hell, the groundglass was really dirty, the bellows were stiff and had pinholes in them, and the whole thing was a bit wobbly. Over a period of about 6 weeks I worked on refurbishing it. I completely disassembled the camera, stripped off all the old finish, repaired the wood where necessary, and refinished it with tung oil. I also sanded and clear-coated the metal parts to make everything run a little more smoothly. Once everything was put back together, it was nice and tight (no wobbles), the wood looked great, and I had a working 8×10. I put up with the bad bellows for a full two years, as they cost about $250 to replace, but even before I got the new bellows put on, this camera brought about a bit of a photographic revelation for me.
Like just about every photographer nowadays, I started out shooting 35mm. Specifically, I started shooting with my father’s old Minolta X-370 and SrT-100. Good manual cameras that taught me a lot, but that I eventually found couldn’t give me what I wanted. From there, I expanded to shooting medium format, which was a lot like shooting 35mm only I got a big, square negative. The next big step was the transition to large format, which I made about 1997, I think, and at which point I started shooting 4×5. This was a big change, both in working methods and in the photographs I produced. It was a very different way of doing things, and I learned a lot, but the biggest change for me came when I started to shoot 8×10. You might think that shooting 8×10 is a lot like shooting 4×5, only with a bigger camera. In some sense, I suppose it is, but in application it’s a different experience altogether. A 4×5, while huge and mysterious to a 35mm photographer, is still only a moderately-sized piece of gear for someone used to shooting medium format. 8×10, on the other hand, can’t really be considered small by any account.
Granted, at this point, 8×10 is the format I really consider to be “normal,” and anything smaller than that is something I honestly can’t take completely seriously any more. Yes, that’s very sad, I know, but oh well. 8×10 fits me like no other format has proved itself able to do thus far. When I shoot 8×10, everything just happens – I don’t really have to think about the technical aspect of it. The camera and the format just become an extension of me, in a way.
Looking at the ground glass under the focusing screen is like looking at a television screen. It’s *huge* I tell you. And, as with any view camera, everything you see there is upside down and backwards as compared to the real world. This really changes the way you look at things. Some people don’t like it and get what’s called a reflex viewer and attach it to their 4×5 cameras so things look “correct,” but for me I think it helps the process. It makes you think about what you’re doing more. Or, rather, it makes you think about what you’re seeing more.
And the results with the 8×10 really speak for themselves. I do not enlarge my 8×10 negatives. Rather, I contact print them. This yields a level of resolution and such a goregous tonality that nothing else can touch it. A contact print is the ultimate in image quality. The way it renders my vision to a final photograph is almost spooky sometimes it’s so good. Gorgeous. Absolutely amazing.
And it’s through using this camera, something that almost takes the form of meditation, that I’ve grown so much as a photographer over the last four years. It’s currently in my room back home, but as soon as I get back to MO, you can be sure I’ll be getting it out and using it again.
And now I’ve completely lost what momentum I had to start with, so this seems a good time to quit writing for today. More tomorrow….maybe.
