Going “large”

How I renovated an old large format 10×8 plate camera for use with paper negatives.

Refurbishing Antique Bellows Cameras

The Blog writing has been on the back burner whilst I spent time refurbishing my two 1900s, mahogany and brass bellows camera. The Boots camera is a single-rack camera and less useful so I decided to refurbish this one keeping it as original as possible. The Hora camera is slightly more modern by 10 -20

Success with the antique camera and shutter

Well, some success and still some failures(learning opportuntites). Saggy bellows have caused a shadow on the negative and one or two film holders have small gaps – now filled.  But the ones that workd I am very pleased with. The big challenge is metering correctly to set the exposure. I realised that in trying to

How to measure the speed of my antique shutter

My Boots branded 100 year old Thornton Pickard camera has a new addition – a mechanical shutter. This allows me to shoot at speeds under 1 second. With these faster speeds I can use 200 ISO sheet film instead of the much slower photo paper. To measure the speed of this shutter, I fixed it

Adding a shutter to my antique camera

In order to access shutter speeds of less than 1s I need a mechanical shutter. I found one on eBay for a bargain price – and it is in good mechanical working order. The challenge was to attach it to the camera as the rubber seal has gone solid. I first rigged a plastic adapter