Wephota Film

A long time ago I shot this film using my Voigtlander Avus camera with some degree of success. The film had to be "glued" in a piece of board with honey and then inserted in the dark slides to be exposed. This is because the film is smaller and obviously much thinner than the original plates in which the camera was designed to take.

This time I have come up with a better solution, I made some "envelopes" from cardboard  with a window. All I have to do is slide the film in this envelope and then insert the whole envelope inside the dark slides. 

The pictures came out well but with loads of spots and I had to spend quite some time cleaning in Photoshop. I believe the spots are either due to the air bubbles from the stand development or the anti-halation layer that wasn't properly washed away. It can also be specs from inside the dark slides, after all they're nearly 100 years old.

The last picture was processed in Rodinal 1:50 normal development, all other pictures were done using stand development, this time I used the 1:200 ratio/two hours stand development with agitation only for the first minute.

And after some cleaning with photoshop...

The details are quite good for such an old lens ...

Voigtlander Avus

This gorgeous German made camera was produced between 1913 to 1934, this particular model was designed to take 6.5x9 glass plates but can also  be used with film as well, all you have to do is find a roll film back to use the 120 format or, with a bit of patience you can “glue” some sheet film in some kind of board to fit in the dark slides.

This one  came with the four original Voigtlander darkslides, I bought  some extra four on ebay to start playing until I can get hold of the roll back which can be tricky to find.

To start I cut few pieces of cardboards on the size of the plates and then glued the sheet film on the board with a bit of honey, which seems to be the preferred method by some folks I spoke to. The film I used was the German Wephota 100 ISO, the size is a bit smaller than I thought and I had a quite hard time in the dark to place the film correctly onto the board, I tried hard to leave as symmetrical as possible but some of the pictures were not in level so I had to adjust in Photoshop.

The film was processed with Rodinal 1:100 solution one hour stand development, the results are quite good but the processing were not even, probably because I had to pre-soak the film in water in order to get rid of the honey… I don’t know. The negatives were scanned and only curves and levels were adjusted, I tried keeping as original as possible.

For those who are used to large format photography will be familiar with the camera's movement. You can focus through the glass window at the back just like any other large format camera or with the scale placed at the front. There’s also a viewfinder at the top of the lens and a spirit level.