RobertBenson.com

Here it is, quite a beauty eh? One frame per three minutes, manual focus only, not weather proof, heavy, made of breakable parts like glass…

Actually it’s not a Nikon (no kidding?), it’s a 1940s-era Speed Graphic camera which I am modifying to fit my needs. The regular 4×5 film camera gives results which I find too pedestrian - they look like images taken with any other large format camera.

I want a camera that will give me results similar to what I get when I do tintype photos - images with distortion, nice bokeh, swirl and unexpected defects. Film cameras don’t generally do that, so I bought an old lens from the 1900s called a petzval lens. These types of lenses have a sharp center area, then rapidly blur to swirls around the edges. Any photo made in the 1800s has this look. When opticians learned how to make better lenses, they were able to get edge to edge sharpness on an image.

This is a tintype I made last year with an 8x10 camera. I'm hoping the results with the frankensteined Speed Graphic will have a somewhat similar look to this.

So I have this old lens that gives the cool bokeh and swirls, and mounted it to my Speed Graphic camera. No shutter in the lens, instead the camera has a focal plane shutter in the rear with speeds from bulb to about 1/750th of a second.

Still though, this combination wasn’t good enough. I was unable to use studio strobe with the thing.

Since its a moving focal plane shutter that has a slit running vertically across the film to make the exposure, the entire piece of film is not all “seen” at the same time. In short, it’s impossible to use the strobe with this camera (unless you use a slow burning, long duration flash bulb like they did in the day, or shoot in bulb in a dark room and pop the flashes then close the shutter). Too much info?

So I bought a packard shutter that operates on air from a guy in Nevada from Jim Galli. For all things old in photography, he’s the man. (er.. Not him being old… the stuff he knows about being old). Also got the lens from him.

The shutter opens from an air bulb when it’s squeezed, and at its fastest speed is about 1/25th of a second. Cool thing is, it has contacts that will fire a flash (or my pocket wizard transceiver) when the shutter is in the open position.

Suddenly I can use this old camera with older lens in the studio or at a location and get cool images! I’m in the process of putting the shutter on now. After I shoot a handful of sheets I’ll post some images.

This is a early 1900s petzval image that gives a unique look - sharp center, blurred edges.

Packard shutter. Operates on air from a squeeze bulb. The kind nurses use when they take your blood pressure.

These are the contacts for the flash. I'll frankenstein these to work with my radio slave transmitter.

This is where the shutter will be mounted on the camera. I'll probably glue the thing on.