Markus Hofstaetter's blog

Wednesday, August 4th, 2021

Shooting Wet Plate Portraits with an affordable Large Format Bokeh Monster

I should stop calling these “Short Projects” short projects. It didn’t take that long, but still longer as expected.
After I bought it at the Camera Obscura Festival
But I still think if you are looking for a affordable large format wet plate camera, you should have a look at the Mentor camera brand. Most of them are build like a tank (Remember, I got another Mentor too, where I did double exposures with: https://youtu.be/y0ccDnXw9xE) and easy to repair. The cool thing of this camera is the curtain shutter and strobe connector. It has also all movements you can imagine, great for architecture, product (or food) photography.
For the wet plate process, you want to look for a fast lens, but these are mostly pretty expensive. Thats why projection lenses are a good options, but most of them are triplet designs – but there are others too, like the Leitz Hektor 200mm F 2.5 that covers 13x18cm plates in portrait distance easily and has 4 glass elements instead of the classic triplets. be aware that the depth of field is razor thin on that lens. I have a second one for sale here http://gear.mhaustria.com with other camera gear I only use very rarely. So I would be happy if this finds someone who uses it again. I just collected to much gear….
In the video, I show you how I repair all the little blemishes of the camera and add two Lenses to it. I even build two lens plateadapters. One to mount lenses from my Century camera to the Mentor and one to mount Linhof Lenses to the Century camera. Check my Thingverse too, I will post some of them there if I am happy with them. . The more I get comfortable with my 3D printer the more I use it, that reflects also in this project. Even some prints take pretty long (my longest one was 16 hours), it saves me lots of time, because I can do different things in-between. And some of the designs would have been much harder to create with traditional wood/metal working.
I really like how the camera, lens plates and wet plate holder turned out. This will be used on many during my workshops (for English ones contact me here)in the future And I am also very happy that Tanja of https://www.unikat.pictures/ helped me out to model for me. Thanks a lot!
If you liked this kind of projects and want to support my upcoming ones, you ca do that here