The Grafmatic back (and yet another 4×5 failure)
2021-LF034
The gentleman who sold me the Linhof later sent me (at no charge!) a Grafmatic sheet film holder. The Grafmatic will hold up to 6 sheets of film at once and allows one to “rapidly” expose them. Here are some instructions.
I loaded four sheets and went out on the deck with Alice to practice. As you can see, it didn’t go all that well. Loading film into the septums was easy enough. And racking the guts of it in and out to “advance” to the next sheet is something I’ll get used to. My problem was that I never advanced past the last frame I shot and then opened the dark slide, exposing and completely wasting one sheet and fogging the next couple. Other than the frontmost sheet, which was totally ruined, this was the worst of them.
Alice with a light leak. Linhof Master Technika.
The other two were salvageable…
It’s as if she was sad for me, in advance. And then the last one, which wasn’t damaged at all…
On the plus side, this makes shooting a series of (handheld) photos with the Linhof pretty speedy. I was able to focus and frame accurately handheld, and that’s quite a feat.
Once I get this dialed in it should be great. I do love how large-format photos render.