52@52 Week 24
And the winner of the race for which Kickstarted camera would get here first was The Intrepid! I didn’t back the Wanderlust Travelwide on Kickstarter, only finding out about it after the campaign was over, but I was one of the first to buy in the pre-order period. Anyway, I picked up the Intrepid at FedEx Tuesday night, and took it in to work with me yesterday (that’s so cool, being able to take a large format camera to work).
Our office is in Soho a few blocks from the Hudson River, and this is the view from my desk (okay, I actually took the camera over to the window so you wouldn’t see the desks between me and the outside). We are often treated to impressive sunsets. I picked up some Portra 400 at B&H on Monday, but wanted to shoot black and white for my first shots with the camera.
I took two shots, one at lunch time and the other around 4:30 as the sun was going down. This one works a lot better. The light was just too flat at noon (not surprising). I shot this on my go-to film, the well-expired Tri-X TXP320. I hear this doesn’t push well, so I may load a few holders with Arista.EDU 400 and do so early evening work in the West Village in coming weeks. The lens was a Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar-S 150, my first time using this lens, which I bought from KEH specifically for this camera. It seemed more suited for a press camera like this than the Symmar-S 210 I’ve been using on my Calumet. I also have a 90mm Angulon mounted in a Linhof lensboard that will work with this camera. I’ll have to give that a try as well.
The camera folds up pretty flat. You can see how it gets set up on their how-to page. I found that it actually fits in the backpack I use to commute to work each day, a Lowepro Fastback 250. It’s a little tight, and I can’t keep the lensboard in place as it’s folded up, but yeah, I can fit a large format camera in my backpack. That’s pretty awesome and opens up a lot of possibilities.
It was maybe 25 degrees out yesterday, so I didn’t take the camera outside, but I can see plenty of opportunity to do so moving forward. Then again, Kathy Akey took an Intrepid to the Arctic, so maybe I have no excuse.
Posted at 4:13 AM