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Darkbox Construction and Usage

By on May 17, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench
Wet Plate Darkbox

Wet Plate Darkbox

The darkbox, it’s such a simple thing but so important. Wet Plates need to be coated, exposed and developed in a darkroom within 10 or so minutes, so unless you want to shoot plates in an area near your darkroom all the time, you’re going to need something mobile.

So how are you going to prepare and develop plates in full sun outside? Easy – a light proof box. Well, maybe not that easy. Let’s look at a few things we need to consider.

1. Light proof box. Even though plates are a little on the slow side (ISO 3 if you’re counting) you still need to prepare and develop them in the dark. And by dark I mean no outside light, the emulsion on a plate is orthochromatic which means it can’t see reds. That means we can use red light inside the darkroom and darkbox. There’s one problem with the lightfast-ness of a darkbox, it’s got a huge hole in it for the photographer. This is usually resolved by a few layers of material that wrap around the darkbox and then the photographer, bunched up to prevent light leaks.

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Camera Challenge: Update 6

By on May 8, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench

Unfortunately, I failed the challenge. But it’s not going to deter me from continuing the project.

All week I had a bunch of items to build and I didn’t really even get the camera on the mill table until Thursday night (for a scheduled update Friday morning). Considering that I finished a full darkbox (post to come) and tripod head down-time for the mill was few and far in between. I had to make a sign first, and had mill problems with the bit staying in place.

So, give me some time to unpack from the reenactment weekend, get my home, office and workshop in order and the camera challenge will resume!

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View through the ground glass

Camera Challenge: Update 5

By on May 3, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench

I really didn’t get a chance to break out the plans until last night. I’ve been working on getting wet plate chemicals together, building my darkbox, tripod and designing on a plate holder.

Quarter Plate Design

Quarter Plate Design

But, a two days before deadline here I am making my first cuts into plywood for my prototype quarter plate camera. I wanted to work on the lens end of the camera first. After the holder, this is the most important part of the camera. This box needs to be perfectly square with parallel sides. Anything less will make for very sloppy movement and possibly introduce light leaks.

The design here is missing a few lines but once they’re broken out and flattened it doesn’ t matter much anyway. Inside the box is a 1/8″ wide, 1/8″ deep groove for the lens board. Once it’s in, it’s in.

Quarter Plate Camera Front

Quarter Plate Camera Front

And once assembled, here’s how it looks with my 9″ Petzval installed. The Petzval has a flange on the back that allows me to screw into the lens board. Some lenses this old may be missing their flanges and it’s extremely difficult to get one made last time I checked. There are other ways to keep it from falling out if you happen to get one with the flange missing.

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The Camera

Camera Challenge: Update 4

By on April 30, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench

We have a basic camera design. Once the quarter plate holder is done we’ll make sure there are no measurement differences and then bust this design out into pieces for milling.

The Camera

The Camera

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CAM breakout of the frame

Camera Challenge: Update 3

By on April 30, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench

Now that I know what size of wood I want to use, I can make some decisions on how I want to cut the frames and how thick.

Plate Cutout, separated

Plate Cutout, separated

To the right is a screen shot of the plate cutout. I measured about 1 3/4″ from each edge and set a line. That leaves a nearly 2″ piece in the middle. Once those lines are set I can start disassembling the frame. To the right of the screen shot is the disassembled frame ready to be imported into the CAM software. I then select these pieces, export them as a DXF and next we’re going to bring this to CamBam.

There are two aspects to the parts we’re exporting. A ‘profile’ and a ‘pocket’. The profile is the outside of the part, this is the cut that will separate the part from the stock material. This is a single line cut and the width of the cut will be the exact thickness of the bit you’ve got on your mill. A pocket is an area where you want material removed that is larger than your bit. Let’s pretend you were cutting a circular piece of wood to hold a camera memory card. The pocket would remove a rectangle in the middle of the wood block only a few mm thick and then a profile would cut around the whole piece and separate it from your stock.

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Quarter Plate Holder, flattened

Camera Challenge: Update 2

By on April 29, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench
Quarter Plate Holder, flattened

Quarter Plate Holder, flattened

(Follow along with the series! Links: First Post, Second Post)

Quarter Plate holder and ground glass design are done. Attached is the design of the holder with dark slide and door.

Once you have a design you need to break it apart for the mill. It can’t understand the files directly and for standard milling it can’t understand 3D either. Now there are ways to make 3D, but for designs like this we don’t need 3D, just what’s called 2.5D which allows me to select lines of the design and tell the program how deep to cut each line.

On the bottom of the photo you’ll see each part flattened (except for the light trap on the top right, I still need to flatten that). We want to keep the 3D model in the same document because as we bring these flattened pieces into our CAM software we’re going to want to refer to the original model for depths. At this point I still need to cut the pieces into strips – think a picture frame. Instead of buying costly wood that is thick enough to mill the frame pieces and then throw away the middle, why not put 45° corners on them and then glue and nail them together?

The size of these pieces depend on the width of the wood stock I have on hand, or sold locally. Thickness of the finished parts may vary as well. If I can adjust the part a little one way or the other while saving time that’s a bonus. Remember that for each cut I’m adding time on the mill table.

I can also re-use this for the ground glass. If I build another holder without the light trap/door and adjust for thickness I have a ground glass that will be perfectly on the same plane as my wet plate!

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Camera Challenge: Update 1

By on April 29, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench

Day one, or the design phase of my ‘Can I build a working wet plate camera in a week’ challenge (For the first post click: LINK).

For CAD design I’m using Google Sketchup 7 (There is a version 8, however 7 has DXF export for free while for 8 it’s an upgrade), CamBam to attach cut operations to the parts, OpenSCAM to simulate the cuts and my 2x4Oko for the actual milling (which is a modified ShapeOKO scaled up to nearly a 2×4′ work table).

Quarter Plate in Sketchup

Quarter Plate in Sketchup

In Sketchup, where to begin? I want the camera to shoot Quarter Plates, so that’s a good place to start. I’ll design around what I want to shoot which is the Quarter Plate (3 1/4 x 4 1/4″). Here it is, set and locked. Now to build a holder around this plate.

What’s going to be the problem? First off, it needs to be completely light tight. I need to be able to prepare the plate in my darkbox and then place it into a holder under safelight conditions. From there it gets walked in the bright sun to the camera. Once connected with the camera the darkslide is pulled out and that exposes the plate to the image projected from the lens.

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Sketch to Shape to Snap in one week

By on April 29, 2013 in Analog, Wet Plate, Workbench
Daguerreotype Camera, Smithsonian Museum of American History

Daguerreotype Camera, Smithsonian Museum of American History

The challenge: Design, mill, build and use a wood wet plate camera in a week. Well, five days.

I’ve talked in the past about the CNC machine, building it, tweaking it, breaking it and learning the process from CAD to real life. Or, as Chris Anderson in the book ‘Makers, the New Industrial Revolution’ puts it.. ‘Bits to atoms’. In the end though, I wanted it for one thing. Building photographic gear. Wood, plastic, metal – I don’t care, as long as I can put photo sensitive material inside and expose to it the world.

Over the past few weeks I’ve perfected (as closely as possible) my own personal ‘bits to atoms’ approach. It’s been a long road for the hardware alone, adjusting, power issues, dust collection. Software has been a bit more forgiving – after all you just make something in a 3D CAD program and hit print right? Not so fast. You then need to disassemble the 3D object as you would something in real life and then lay it out. From there you take it into your CAM program which allows you to specify the boundaries of each piece to tell the CNC machine what to cut out.

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Internet Explorer Updates

By on April 5, 2013 in Uncategorized

Some updates have blowed up how older versions of Internet Explorer view the site. So, if you’re not running the lastest version (v8 is broken for sure) please update! Or maybe try out a few of the other fine web browsers on the market like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

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You won’t like ShapeOKO when it’s angry…

By on February 25, 2013 in Workbench

I guess I shouldn’t have ignored the urge, I mounted my normal sized ShapeOKO to a 2×4′ worktable and then thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to upgrade the mill take up the whole table?”  Here it is, the 2x4Oko, or ShapeOKO Hulked out. Originally 15″ square, now 24×48″. Eventually I’ll get all of these modifications out of the way and actually start milling things…

Details to come…

The 2x4Oko

The 2x4Oko, 2×4′ worktable. Cut area is about 17×36″

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