You can Start Shooting a Large Format Film in the 21st Century
Recreating the Unique Photo Experience From the 1960s
There was an estimate that about 196 million photos per hour are made nowadays, and I can bet that 99.999% of them are digital. But you can still use this type of camera for taking pictures, and I promise, the process is fun.
How does it work? Let’s figure it out.
History
Photography as a process has a long history, the first “daguerreotypes” were made in the middle of the 19th century. Photographic lenses of that time were far from perfect, and the sensitivity was also very low — an exposure time to take a picture could be from 3 to 20 minutes. Later a dry plate technology was invented, which allowed to increase the sensitivity and decrease the exposure time. But cameras of that time still were big and bulky:
As a “light sensor”, these cameras were using glass plates, covered with a light-sensitive emulsion. Later roll film was invented, and cameras became much more compact and portable, like this “Kodak Brownie” from the 1920s:
