My vacation report

[Bob Clark <clark@xxxxxxx>]

Well, I thought I pass along my MF3D news for the last month...

I brought my camera along on two family vacations this past
August and early September.  I have looked at most of the
images, but haven't mounted them yet.  There are a few good
ones, many "not too bad" ones, and a few for the trash.

What I used this time around was a Graflex XL body with
a Noritar 80mm lens and a Graflex 6x6 back on a tripod.
This setup has some advantages and disadvantages...

  + nice choice of lenses (Noritar, Planar, many others)
      o the Noritar uses a nice Copal shutter and stops
	down to f32
  + the graflok back lets me
      o focus on a ground glass (there is a RF, also)
      o keep the film packs cool and out of the sun as
	much as possible
      o can easily swap lenses or film packs (e.g. I also
	took some 6x9 flatties of the nice scenery)
  - the camera is a bit bulky and heavy
  - there are MANY of manual steps involved in shooting
    a stereo pair and I've messed up more than image
    by missing a step (like forgetting to stop down the
    aperture after focusing or replacing the dark slide)!

I've been using one of the Bogen slide plate thingies and
am very happy with it for slide-bar use.  It is very solid
and quick and doubles as a quick-release to get the camera
off the tripod.

If everything comes together, I really like the results I
get.  Unfortunately, working with a slidebar, I am always
fighting retinal-rivalry problems with something moving
between the two shots.  Sometimes very long exposures can
blur some motion (e.g. moving water) to the point where
the RR doesn't bother me much.  I tried this approach with
moving grass and it didn't work so well.

One of the things I didn't think I had to worry about was
shutter differences (because I was using the same shutter
for both shots), but 1/15 second on this shutter turns out
to be so erratic that I ruined a few good images with
uneven exposures :(

I'm still dreaming of the day when I can get my Diacords
bolted together and/or build my stereo MF view camera.

--
Bob