Homemade camera 16 × 20 inches in 10 hours

American photographer Giles Clement (Giles Clement) tells how he and a friend put together a professional camera size 16 × 20 inches in just ten hours. Everyone can repeat this feat.

It all started with a glass of beer in a bar where Giles showed his friend a sketch on a napkin, which he actually wanted to do.



Immediately from the bar, they went to Home Depot and bought wooden blanks, and also took a roll of plastic for furs, bolts and screws. Everything cost $ 168, so expensive, because plastic was sold only in large rolls for $ 70.

Returning to the studio, the guys drank more beer and took up the assembly.



The back with glass has a standard size of 16 × 20 inches. The image is formed on glass by the method of ambrotipy. This is a variant of the collodion process, which is suitable for portraiture or still lifes. Here, the exposure time of a pre-processed glass plate varies from one to sixty seconds or more, depending on the brightness of the subject, its color and the set aperture.

To make the glass frosted, it was treated with 100 grit sandpaper.





Then they made the front of pine blocks and a piece of plywood with a hole for the lens.

Furs made of plastic. Giles says his acquaintances buy such furs for large format cameras for hundreds and thousands of dollars. When you do it yourself, it turns out much cheaper.

So that the camera can focus, the back must move forward and backward. The photographer provided mobility quickly with the help of plastic tubes and wooden dowels.



It's time to fix the furs, they had to tinker with them. It turned out not perfect, but still managed to securely reel them. A lens was inserted into the front panel and, in principle, the camera is already ready for use.









Some assembly steps are recorded on video.



In the local photo store, there was only one tray 16 × 20 inches in size, and they needed three for different solutions when processing a glass plate, including silver nitrate and fixer. I had to use the containers at hand, which were found in the house.







Giles used a very bright flash, so sitting in front of the camera at the time of the flash is not much fun. But portraits of such a large size look really impressive.





The shooting process is shown in the video.