Saw a big camera...

Juan Valdenebro

Juan Valdenebro

Truth is beauty
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May 23, 2009
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Today I was shooting and suddenly I saw a white haired man with a wood tripod and a wood large format camera in the street... The lens (from distance) looked really old... As I started to approach him thinking of a shot including him and his camera in the middle of lots of tourists snapping digitals near the sea border in Las Ramblas, I just forgot about even shooting...


The camera was huge... I told him: Excuse me, I'm curious... Could you please tell me which film are you using?


“It's not film...” I was really surprised, and for an instant I thought he had adapted a digital back for some strange reason... (The back was hidden as usual with LF...) But then he told me: “It's photography in the old way...” and I told him “So, like Atget you refuse to use film...” and he answered “For Atget it was a lot easier, this is just emulsion: wet plates...”


I told him: “Wow, then you must act real fast!” We talked for a while: he seemed to know some of my old teachers, and he showed me the camera back: his 8x10 plates occupied just a small central part of his enormous back! I think a yogi could live inside that camera!


The ISO was below 1... He had just made an exposure of ten seconds on direct sun... The lens (beautiful, golden and so primitive, portraiture tele) was from 1860... Then his walkie-talkie hanging next to his Sekonic made a sound and he explained: “See there in the park below those trees...?” “We're a team of 6 people: I'm the only one in Spain doing Heliography now... That tent is our lab, and they just developed the plate: takes just a few seconds to develop it and fix it, and we can see the results and go on shooting... I'll go see it... This is hard: moving all this stuff is tough, and even UV rays and temperature affect the emulsion a lot: mettering is far from being enough to be sure of the results, so getting one good plate in one day is a real treasure!


We gave each other our emails, and I told him: “I hate these days when small variable haze clouds are all around in the sky and then light changes every minute... And from your face I see you hate it too!” and he smiled: “I'm old and I have hated it all my life...” I wished him good luck with the plate and we said goodbye.


He's a professional architecture photographer and works with top quality LF film and MF digital cameras, and he told me “I hate digital, and I find most present days photography totally empty, and full of vanity too... When I see how hard it was getting images in the 19th century, and the real taste those great photographers had, I feel sad about these days photography... My soul is there, forever...”

Nice guy...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Sounds like a fun way to spend one's gray haired days. I'll be there soon enough. Who cares if film really will be dead by then. Cows hooves, table salt and lunar caustic won't.
 
He was at the end of Las Ramblas? That's some place to shoot... :) I'm sure most people just ignored him and he must have been delighted to get your attention.

BTW, it was in BCN where I saw the biggest camera in my life, but it was a Mamiya 67, being hoisted by a crew in front of La Boquería. I thought you had seen that one...

Thanks for posting!
 
How cool to get to see that in person, and talk to him! One of my long term goals is to be able to do either paper negatives, wet plate, or both. I need either a back that can handle them, or a camera better suited to doing them. I have two different 4x5 cameras, and would rather do around 8x10 for something like this.
 
By the way, the back of the camera was square...

Zane, Rob, Chris... Cool! Maybe one day...!

Francisco: Indeed no one cared about him... I guess most people consider those cameras "old and bad"... :) He also told me he makes big efforts in trying to avoid people coming near or talk to him, and that's why he doesn't want the rest of the team to be near, so people passing don't feel "an interesting thing happening"... Three different assistants came to him for a few seconds every time to tell him things because they were having troubles with their new talkies... We joked: "... and the camera just like new!"

Cheers,

Juan
 
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