Intrepid 8x10 Camera: Capture to Print using Large Format Film

In this video, I take the Intrepid 8x10 camera to Santa Cruz County, then back to the studio to make some portraits. I then show prints made from two different processes, both from 8x10 negatives created with the Intrepid.
#filmphotography #darkroom #intrepidcamera

[@CertainExposures]

I enjoyed watching your platinum process and print mounting. Cool stuff!

[@garyjames-ij4fr]

Nice job. Way better than most KZbin photography videos.

[@SomeDudeSomewhere]

very cool video of the whole process, thank you! Although I would really like to see the final result in detail, just to understand how nice is the final quality better.

[@mamiyapress]

It would have been nice to have viewed the straight print properly

[@EdwardMartinsPhotography]

The Intrepid isn't the prettiest camera, but it gets the job done. 8x10 is a great format. The Stearman developing tray is the way to go. But is is a little slow as you said. I also use mine for 4 sheets of 4x5 as well.

[@Rkolb2798]

One thing I learned about medium and large format cameras is You need a HD Tripod 😊

[@kobylcarter]

Can you make a similar video with the enlargement process of 35mm?

[@jpdj2715]

Flashbacks. Nice work. 30 minutes to "develop" seemed long at first, but then I thought, oh, he must reference the entire wet process: developer, [stop bath,] fixation, rinsing? You must know all the following, but it could make for a next video, maybe. I'd argue that the slowness is not in the tray you use, because the entire process will need some 30 minutes, however "we" had upright tanks that we could hang a number of negatives in so as to process them all together. You use the metal frame hanging in the drying cabinet and that frame works upright in the wet too. So, yes, the per negative slowness follows from the tray that accommodates only one negative at a time. Another thing is that the film developer solution has its chemicals sucked out of the water surrounding the film into the emulsion. This robs a thin layer of water around the film from chemicals and as long as you don't move the tray, diffusion that goes slow will bring unused chemicals into that "empty" space. Some photographers in the past (and still today) could religiously process their film that way but it would take much more time. Reasons to play with "motion" - how wild and how many times - during developing: it impacts contrast/gradation, contrast envelope, and may impact "sensitivity", plus it may impact grain. With such standing tanks, we would "replenish" the solution after each use, up to a number of times, because each use consumed part of the chemicals in the water. That's less precise and more economical, than taking a new solution every time. In the video, you don't go into tilt/shift and stay away from Scheimpflug's Law, not a problem (although a mathemagician would argue you do use that law because of an axiom in geometry), but also good to point at. You can use a simple large format camera without all the hassle. As you exposed the landscape image in full daylight for a relatively long time, you must have stopped down the aperture a lot - what aperture number was it at? And, as you stopped that lens down a lot, what lens was it? "We" had so-called " 8"*10" " lenses, way back that only gave an image circle large enough when stopped down a lot. At full open they might do 5"*7" or 4"*5" without having to worry. Which is to say, did you stop down purely for Depth of Field (DoF), or to arrive in the lens's operational zone? Do you have a 4"*5" adapter-back with the 8"*10"? Then you can do what Yousuf Karsh [1] did in most of his portraits - he used a Kodak 14" ("Commercial Ektar") lens cropped and that gave him "portrait distance" in the case of half or head shots. As the 14" at 8"*10" compares to your 35mm "full frame" camera's "nifty fifty", I would also point to the focal length of 355.6 mm (=14"). At 8"*10" you would need some 600mm for an image angle comparable to 85mm with 35mm and a 350mm or 600mm has shallow DoF even at f/22. [1] Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) - during his career as portrait photographer held 15,312 sittings, producing over 250,000 negatives. Some of the sitters were: Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Alberto Giacometti, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli _AKA_ Pope John XXIII, Anita Ekberg, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu _AKA_ Mother Teresa, Ansel Adams, Apollo 11: Neil A. Armstrong & Michael Collins & Edwin E. 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Bernard Shaw, Brigitte Bardot, Carl Jung, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret _AKA_ Le Corbusier, Christian Dior, Clark Gable, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth II Queen of England, Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Bernard Shaw, Georgia O'Keefe, Gerard Depardieu, Grace Kelly _AKA_ Princess Grace, Gregory Peck, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, I.M. Pei, Jacqueline Kennedy, Jacques Cousteau, Jan Smuts, Jessye Norman, Joan Miró, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Karol Józef Wojtyła _AKA_ Pope John Paul II, King Faisal, Lord Beaverbrook, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Marcel Marceau, Marian Anderson, Martha Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., Mikhail Gorbachev, Mstislav Rostropovich, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Casals, Pablo Picasso, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Robert Oppenheimer, Sophia Loren, Ulla Jacobsen, W.H. Auden, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill.

[@silverandplatinum]

Yeah I've played around a little with stand development. I also have one of those CatLABS clips that can do 3 sheets of 8x10 at once, but it's such a pain to load that I'm always worried I'll do it wrong. I like the Stearman tank because it's pretty much idiot-proof. I think that long exposure was around f/45 - wanted to make sure the ship was in sharp focus, plus I got the water nice and smooth. Thanks for watching!

[@garyjames-ij4fr]

How about a video showing the process to make an enlargement from sheet film.

[@silverandplatinum]

Great idea! That video will likely happen at some point

[@HarveyWallbanger-ho2cq]

Doesn't look any better than my Hasselblad