If you ever gave up about a camera because of missing or broken ground-glass you will regret about it after reading this post. It is very easy to produce a high quality ground-glass for replacement or for a new project for a large-format camera. Nowadays when old processes, old lenses and cameras...
Everyone has seen a photographer, in movies, burning something that seems to make more smoke than light. That was the flash powder. It consists of a metal part and an oxidant. A mixture that resembles gunpowder. This was used for photography from its very first decades up to nearly mid of the...
Any scene you can shoot is made up of objects that emit light (own or reflected) and it is from this light that the lens will form an image to be recorded on film or digital sensor. If it were possible to block almost all light coming from a scene, like this one from my apartment window, leaving...
Yes, light is a wave, and then … Wave, is a phenomenon in which there is energy transmission without transport of matter. It’s like energy traveling in space. It is easier to understand if we think of an example where there is matter transporting energy. For example, to drop a...
The practice that I will describe is the one that allowed me to take some reasonable pictures of seagulls in Hamburg harbor in Germany in 2008. Later, in other occasions, it served me again and I lost less time to catch some images birds flying. That is the case, to my level of requirements, of...
With digital cameras is always good the possibility of checking the result right after the click. Those who never used film don’t know how good it is. But sometimes, a quick evaluation may show that the picture registered is OK and later, on the computer, we realise that shooting it...
If you consider adding some chemistry to your photography, but are uncertain about the difficulties in setting up a darkroom in terms of time, work and money… then this post is for you. The idea is exactly to reflect upon ways and alternatives to leave for a while the digital. I say...
The intention in this post is to explain what softwares for image editing do when you adjust sharpness of an image. Sharpning in a great many of contemporary photos, done and retouched digitally, has turned into a sort of convention and photographers may feel like missing the party if they do not...
When we think about alternative processes in photography, what comes to our minds, is a sort of brownish prints showing cloudy images, because they were produced the way it was in the infancy of photography. Many people associate this kind of roughness to constrains given by early phases of...
A simple and nevertheless very important point in darkroom practice is keeping control of time for baths and processes. For a long time I used the “triple timer” and it it never failed. It works till today. But the electronics embedded on it falls very short when compared even...
At the heart of digital world we find the “bit”. At the heart of digital images we find the “pixel”. The pixel was already know in Antiquity. But as for the want of fine electronics it used to be made out of little stones and “files” were called mosaics. The...
Many old large format lenses, which are very interesting to use, have no built in shutter. They are called lenses in barrel. For a long time the most popular shutter used with them, normally in front of the lens, was the roller-blind type. The system of having a light proof cloth with a window that...