Bang! I just spent a dollar.
As of late I’ve been attempting a lot more street photography then I’ve ever done before. Most of what I shot so far sucks, but that is besides the point. The real point is that a few days ago I started reminiscing about using my Speed Graphic hand held, and got the notion in my head to get it ready, and if we ever get some sunlight in this town again, spend a day on the street with it.
I bought an old 90mm press lens a while back, but never used it hand held. So, I figure I’ll give that guy a go when this outing happens. I’m not going to recalibrating the rangefinder for it since the DOF is pretty massive. Instead I’ll just make about three distance markings on the board somewhere and calibrate to that. I really should only need two of them. One for close, and one for not so close. Combine this without a usable viewfinder for the focal length, and I’m really going to be roughing it. I can’t wait.
The other thing I’ve been doing in preparation is trying to figure out how to actually release the shutter. The focal plane is always easy, but the speeds I’ve measured of it don’t exactly progress in nice even stops, so I think I’ll use the leaf shutter that I recently had CLA’d at Flutot’s Camera Rrepair. Playing with cable releases, the old Kalart one that attaches itself to the camera to make a thumb trigger doesn’t seem to like to set the 90mm’s shutter off, so I’ll have to resort to my standard cable release. After playing around with how to hold the camera, and use this release, I came up with the following method that looks promising. Basically, I slide my left hand under the strap to hold the camera, and then thread the cable release between my hand & the camera’s body between my index & middle finger. This lets me wrap my index finder around the cable release to trip the shutter by squeezing my index finger the same way that one would fire a pistol. This frees up my right hand completely to do things like focus, change shutter speed, advance film, fend of evil doers, etc. . Mouse over the image below to see the trigger release in action.
While we are on the subject of handheld 4×5, I just created a set on my Flickr page that shows a good selection of the better shots that I’ve shot handhold in the past. More are there then you’ll find in my gallery here. You can view them here.