4 Frames with the Cadobo XL

I finally got around to cutting some paper for my large format Cadobo XL lumen camera. It uses 4.25" paper, I think that makes it large format, no?

I wound up using the last of my Kodak II paper for this. I have to say I was a little surprised by yesterday's results. I thought I had a fair idea of what Kodak II looked like, but I guess not. I remembered it as being quite similar to Kodak IV, but yesterday's tests proved me wrong. In this context of lumen photography, the Kodak II had a lot less contrast and color than I was expecting.

I've been working on the focusing and other aspects of this camera. It's a bit touchy in that regard, with such a wide open (f/2) aperture the sweet spot of hyperfocal focus is very thin and hard (for me) to hit. You'll notice a range of out of focusness in these shots. It seems like the hyperfocal range for this camera and aperture is from about 8 feet to infinity. Because I have to take the cardboard film back apart a little bit and replace the photo paper with a piece of vellum. I'm trying to get around focusing on a shot by shot basis, but I think for closer shots there will be no way around that.

When I did hit focus fairly well, I was surprised at the fidelity of the shots for something that I made. The lens is a glass lens, but it's a headlight lens so I suppose I was expecting more abberations than I got. I find these shots to be more subtle in their visual qualitied than the plastic lensed Cadobo cams.

Also, in use the shutter is a bit awkward to fix in the up position causing quite a bit of camera shake as soon as the exposure starts, the beginning of the exposure seems to be when the paper is most sensitive, so this results in a bit of double exposure effect. I hope to modify the shutter today or soon at least.

I'm looking forward to using up my remaining sheets of Kodak II paper and trying some Kodak IV in this version of the Cadobo cam.

All these shots were taken with wet paper, exposure times were from 50 minutes to 2 hours.