In my cellar I have a small half bath that is never used. I recently decided that it would make a suitable location for a small darkroom space. With a little preparation I was soon back into developing my own images. The nice thing about this particular space in my house is that it naturally resides in darkness. Being in the cellar there are no windows to worry about. What little light leakage there was, like around the door and in one small corner, was easily remedied with minor alterations. Another nice feature about this setup is that I have ready access to running water. A necessity for rinsing between development baths. I'll write more about that in a separate article. My decision for setting up a darkroom came about out of necessity for developing some new direct positive  paper from Galaxy Paper, a Kickstarter campaign I had supported. For my support I received a package of 25 sheets of 4x5 paper and the required chemicals to develop them. Now that I had the space it w...

Several years ago I purchased a used large format camera and had it modified to accept my dSLR camera (seen here). I basically turned a 4x5 view camera into a very large tilt shift lens. It serves its purpose. I now have a full range of movements not available in a standard tilt-shift. For one, a tilt-shift lens can tilt and shift or swing and shift. It just can't do all three. On my system I have tilt, swing, shift, rise and fall on both the front standard and rear standard. Now, if all this sounds like gibberish to you take a few minutes and google these terms. While this has nothing to do with the real subject of this post, it's always good to learn a little something in the process. In truth, I want to talk about putting my large format camera back to use as it was originally intended, to shoot 4x5 film. Or, as in my case, 4x5 photo paper (think pinhole cameras).

One of our more popular events is the Multiplicity  shoot. This is a fun selfie portrait  event where we set up our cameras, take multiple photos of ourselves and combine them into a single frame so it looks like we're interacting with our twins. At right is an example of one my grandson and I did together a few years ago. While it may seem complicated, the editing part is quite simple. I'll walk you through the steps to accomplish this effect.

Sue Fenton heads up Shutter-Buds on Meetup.com , a local photography group, and she has a knack for putting together some great meetups. If you are a local hobbyist photographer and don't know Sue or her group I strongly suggest checking her out. This past Saturday she, and a small crew of volunteers, put together a fantastic event featuring the very talented and inspirational, New York based fashion photographer,  Lindsay Adler . Miss Adler is a Canon Explorer of Light  photographer, educator and just an all around really great person. She is open and sharing and can probably inspire a dead person to get up and start dancing. She is that good. The event took place at one of the most unique venues I have been to in a long time. The place is called Trinity on Main , located in New Britain, CT, and is a church that has been converted to a multi use event space. While still operating as a church for the United Methodist Church, they expanded to serve as a cultural center t...