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Shutter Speeds in the real world In our last video, Top Ten Things That I wish I had known when starting in Large Format Photography, I made some harsh remarks about shutters. Mainly, that they're notoriously inaccurate and that you should have them calibrated. This creates another issue: now that you've got a chart showing the marked speed vs the actual speed, what do you do with it? This is also an issue if your meter uses the more modern sequence: 1/30, 1/60, 1/125..., and your lens uses the traditional 1/25, 1/50, 1/100 ... Of course, the math required to...

By Don Stark

I’m typically not one to be excited about shooting expired film, but when my buddy Tim Gilbert at Stearman Press told me he had a roll of my favorite discontinued Kodak transparency film, that was a different matter.

We know we're supposed to focus on "large format" but last November we ran into a deal on 35mm film that we couldn't pass up. But since we haven't found a use for it yet, we're just going to give it away. Knowing that many of you also shoot 35mm, we decided to offer our newsletter subscribers first dibs. But when it's gone, it's gone. It's all expired but what we've tested has been quite usable. The E6 came out great, even at rated ISO; Tri-X and FP4 was a bit grainy, as expected (when shot at about half the...

Last week we did a comparison of the Toyo 45CF and the Nagaoka 4x5 field camera. In many ways, these cameras represent opposite ends of the last century: wood, leather and steel vs high-tech composites. Details here: https://shop.stearmanpress.com/blogs/news/camera-compare-nagaoka-4x5-and-the-toyo-45cf It only seemed reasonable to give the same treatment to the Graflex Super Graphic. After all, in many ways, the Super Graphic (introduced in 1956) is the grandfather of the Toyo (born in 2002). So we spent most of yesterday shooting the video. By the time it was edited, we realized it was actually rather boring! It had turned into a tutorial...