The Nomadic Frog Blog

I’ve been looking at a lot of portraiture lately and noticing that much of what I like was shot on a 4×5 camera. It inspired me to work more with my 4×5 view camera, for one, but that’s not nearly as much fun as buying a new camera altogether.

The idea was that with the attached Kalart rangefinder I could focus without the slow agony of dealing with an upside down, backwards, and hard-to-see image on the ground glass.

To eBay! And to Goodwill to buy a vest! (I’ll need a hat, too, with a card sticking out of it saying “PRESS”.)

I have learned a few lessons already. First of all, just because you search for “4×5 speed graphic” on eBay does not mean that the results are necessarily all 4×5 cameras. This I found out when – auction won – I got the box in the mail, opened it, and pulled out the curiously small film holder that came with it. “Gee, that’s smaller than my other 4×5 film holders… and why does it say 3¹/₄ x 4¹/₄ on it?”

Lesson number two: when you ask somebody on eBay specifically “does the shutter function” and they reply “it looks great!” they may, in fact, not have a clue what they are talking about. It does, in fact, look great. It does not, however, “function”. Still, the guy who is going to clean and adjust the shutter (for another $75) assured me I got a decent deal on the whole thing anyhow and I should not be too upset.

As for the rangefinder to focus concept… well, that’s fine if you’re hand holding, but if you’re on a tripod for a nice studio portrait and your subject’s eyes don’t happen to be where the rangefinder zone is… not so useful. All of a sudden having that ground glass sure sounds like a nice idea.

Anyhow, enough complaining. The whole thing seems relatively decent. It came with a 120 roll film back which the repair man mused would, on its own, probably fetch what I paid for the whole kit. So I can shoot – and easily develop – 120 roll film with this (and the rangefinder) Once, that is, I get back on eBay and buy a developing tank, reel, and changing bag. Sigh.

A couple of months ago I was shopping in a Hobby Lobby for supplies to make my photography portfolio when I came across a package of Sunart paper. I clearly remember having those blueish sheets when I was a kid, and now I was interested to note that this was more than just a childhood gimmick – somewhere in the small print the label mentions these were “cyanotypes”, a legit form of photography. So I picked up the pack…and let it sit unopened on my desk for a while.

Now that school is out and I have some time to catch up on things, I finally dusted off the envelope of paper and had a look. I had seen that the packaging mentioned that, in addition to placing objects on the paper (leaves, keys, etc.) you could also make contact prints from negatives (provided you had sufficiently large negatives).

I figured “hey, if I can make contact prints I could also cut the paper to size and stick it in my 4×5 view camera!”, bypassing the traditional film negative. They say that a negative could take up to two hours to expose, so I tried two hours in the view camera.

Nothing. Four hours…

…nothing. Well, if you look closely you can just barely see the bright white roof of Ohio University’s Convocation Center in the top left of the image and the sky above the hills north of Athens along the top.

At that point I did some more research and discovered that the light-sensitive chemicals require UV light – frequently/usually blocked by normal camera lenses. Ooops.

That was a bit of a disappointment, since now I’m back to just making normal contact prints, but at least I have some 4×5 negatives to work with. It still took a while to figure out exposures. I’m really not sure where they come up with 2 hours for negative contact prints: in my experiments 1 hour was too much, 20 minutes still – even 6 minutes were too long. For this negative, at least, 3 minutes in bright sun seems to be about right.

A friend of mine mentioned rinsing in bleach to bring out vivid blues and online research mentioned ammonia, among other things to rinse with (no, I did not find out what happens if I mixed bleach and ammonia). Turns out bleach makes it much darker and richer, so that’s cool too. Once I run out of the Sunart pre-made paper I’ll get some real cyanotype chemicals and take it from there.

So, more to come… but first I need some more interesting negatives to work with, which is a whole different challenge.

A while ago I got the urge to spray paint everything in my sent the same color and make some photographs, just playing with the shapes, colors, and shadows. I made a set with cupcakes back around Valentines Day, then I decided recently to expand the series. It was a lot of fun to run around to all the thrift stores, dollar stores, and just the kitchen cabinet to find things to paint – and unlike with the cupcake period it wasn’t 15F outside and the paint dried, with the fumes outside the apartment, quickly.

I think the series can go on indefinitely. I’m excited about various shades of brown – maybe for cinnamon twists, but I’m thinking the next one needs to be green. I’m thinking mint. I’m thinking “mojito”.

We’ve got a chocolate cupcake, lemon cheesecake, blueberry scones, and orange cookies.

I liked the orange set a lot, so I worked it a bit more.

I had to paint several coats over several days, and my backdrop paper got to be pretty cool. Then, below, I shot all of the sets with my Arca Swiss 4×5 view camera with a 210mm lens and a Leaf Aptus digital back. Then I shot it all with my Canon 5D Mark II, just to be sure. in the final shots the blue one is from the 5D, the others are all view camera / digital back shots.

Best part is, since I didn’t do anything nasty to the food and it isn’t really perishable, I got to eat the props after I was done. Yummy.

A recent speaker was giving a talk about SEO and how important blogs are to improving it. Made me think “I wonder if my blog shows up in search results at all (i.e., is it even being indexed)?” I decided to Google two words that came to mind which would be on my blog and, I erroneously thought, not elsewhere. The first two words I thought of from my recent posts were “scuba cupcake”.

Here’s the top result.

The speaker also repeatedly drove home his conviction that whatever you do, do NOT be a generalist. Find your niche, find what you are passionate about and can focus on for five years, and DO IT.

Ok, guess I’d better get right on changing my complete personality – what has made me me for 37 years. Everyone is telling me the same thing, so I must be wrong. Anyone have any suggestions for which of my various interests I should focus on?

I’ve wanted to learn to SCUBA dive for a long time. I figured I’d just go on a vacation to Sharm el Sheikh or something (that was much more feasible when living back in Amsterdam) and do a short course to get certified. Boy am I glad I didn’t do that. As the OU SCUBA t-shirts say, “Don’t just get certified, learn to dive!” I think there is a big difference: learning the skills and information over a period of several weeks – as opposed to a weekend – makes me feel much more comfortable and safe. Plus it gave me a little bit of time to get in sufficient shape that I wouldn’t drown from exhaustion.

Speaking of drowning, there was a swim test on the first day of class. The first portion of the test was to tread water for 3 minutes with our hands above our heads. I knew I was in trouble when people watching started pointing at me and the lifeguard slowly made her way around to my side of the pool. I only went under briefly, though, and managed to get through the middle portion of the test ok. Then the final 12-lap (width) swim was just mind-over-matter – and patience. But the good thing about pushing your personal limits – no matter how lame they are compared to people who are actually in shape and know how to swim – is knowing that your limits are actually pretty far out there and until you get to them nothing really bad is going to happen.

I spent the next few weeks learning how to clear the pressure in my ears, learning how to do surface dives, clear our masks, and other basic skills. Once I was able to deal with the pressure in my ears, dive efficiently, and hold my breath for a little bit, it was really awesome. Laying on the bottom of the deep end, gazing up with all that water and people floating on the surface…just cool stuff. And it got better once we were on air and I had more than 10 seconds of bottom time to enjoy things.

After completing the course and taking the final written and swimming exams for the class we had several options for the actual certification check-out dives. One was pretty cheap – only $45 – to go swim in a quarry in, of all places, Circleville (the town where I grew up). No thanks. Option three was to spend a week on a sailboat in the Bahamas… for $1500 or so. Probably a great deal, but even I couldn’t figure out a way to justify it. So I took the middle route: about $300 for a long weekend trip to some clear water springs in Florida.

After a crazy 15-hour drive south we pulled into Devil’s Den campground and SCUBA diving spot. Set up camp in the dark, which was fine for me, until I discovered in the light of day that I was apparently the only one who didn’t group their tents all together in a nice social bunch. Well, the nice social grouping was in the bottom of a ravine that filled up with water the next night, so I don’t feel so bad up on my small hill.

The first morning of diving was a load of fun – it was great to be in the real world instead of a swimming pool. Also very nice to be wearing a 5mm wetsuit (and therefore not be shivering constantly). One new lesson learned, though: eating baked beans for dinner could result in an uncontrollable air space the next day. During the first checkout dives I was trying to equalize my ears by holding my nose and blowing, damn near equalized something else.

Unfortunately on one of the dives I managed to get stuck under a rock and then screw up control of my buoyancy and went up a little too fast into rocks that were a little too sharp, but the panic was manageable and I have a hard head, as I’ve been told many times.

After the morning checkout dives we spent the two afternoons snorkeling in various super clear waters around our part of Florida. The first day we headed into the Crystal River network of rivers, in part to see manatees. Unfortunately we were not allowed to wear any weight belts, so in our wetsuits we were more buoyant than corks bobbing on the surface – couldn’t dive or get close to things much at all. Considering in the 5mm wetsuit I normally wear 19 lbs of lead not having that makes a big difference. At least I didn’t have to worry about getting tired of swimming – I couldn’t sink if I wanted to.

We did see a few manatees in the muddier river we were in after that, but right as one was swimming in front of me some big old guy swam between us and kicked me in the face with his fin, so I left the area – he was fat enough I figured beating the snot out of him might be mistaken as harassing a manatee by a passing park ranger.

The second afternoon we drifted down the Rainbow River, which was cool as hell. It’s this good-sized river that is very nearly crystal clear – and very fast moving. If it weren’t for the other students swimming so (too) fast it wouldn’t have been necessary to swim at all, really except to get closer to something you wanted to see. We were allowed weight belts, too, so diving down and swimming with the fish was a hoot. Who would have thought we would voluntarily strap lead weight on to get in water – and be mad when we weren’t allowed?

One of the highlights of the trip – and some of the better photos I managed with my little point-and-shoot – were of a school of alligator gar that swam by me at one point. I probably spent 10 minutes lazily swimming interlocking loops around them as they made their way around and down the river.

Now to do something really cool, like the Red Sea or Belize or something. And with real camera gear. Stay tuned.

More photos >>