A Weekend of Cameras?

My daughter went on a whale watch cruise with her school, so I "loaned" her the Coolpix 5600 from my KAP rig. (I say "loaned", but we originally got that camera for the kids, so in a way it's coming home to roost.) In any case, the camera was out all day on a boat in the middle of the ocean, so I'm at least partially expecting it to be damaged, destroyed, or lost. This is no slam against my daughter, mind you. Boats just eat cameras. They do. So does salt water.

So this weekend I plan to finish the 4x5 box camera. If anything went wrong on the cruise, it may be my only KAP camera!

There's really not too much left to do. I need to make the spring back to hold the film holder in place, and I need to make the lens board clamps to hold the lens board on. Past that the only real work is machining, preferably in Delrin, to make a cable release that can be driven by a servo. Radio and batteries will be mounted using Velcro (normal, for me), so that's about it. May sound like a lot, but I expect I can get the wood work done for the back this evening, and the clamps are all drill press and bending brake work. The most tedious bit will be waiting for the umpteen zillion coats of tung oil on the spring back to dry.

After looking at a bunch of B&W and large format groups on Flickr, I'm convinced that long exposures on waterfalls in B&W are cool. Since this place is crawling with waterfalls, I really don't have any excuse. I need to get out this weekend and get shooting.

Two Portra VC sheets can be pulled from their film holder to be shipped to the Fuji lab in Arizona, making it a total of five film holders I can now travel with (YAY!) Ten shots without having to reload in the field. That's more than I can comfortably develop in a single run, so more than that really wouldn't do me much good.

I have one KAP shot I really want to get this weekend (assuming the camera makes it back from the whale cruise), but it requires high tide to pull off the shot, and an offshore breeze to boot. High tide is before sunrise or 5:15pm these days, so I hope I get some cooperative wind this weekend. I'd like to get this shot done and get it out of the way. Meanwhile if I can do some 4x5 with some sea turtles, I'll be a very very happy individual.

Hope it's a good weekend! Sure shaping up to be.

Tom