Image of the Week: Bedroom, Homer Noble Farm, Ripton, Vermont

You don't need expensive gear to make great images, just a simple camera, your eyes, and your mind.

I've been shooting some B&W landscapes, exteriors, and interiors of the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont for Middlebury College. For the majority of the images, I've been using my Tachihara 4x5 field camera and Schneider Symmar-S lenses, but every so often a certain scene catches my eye and I switch to my 1950's-era Crown Graphic and a 1930's-era Agfa 10.5cm Solinar lens that I rescued from a crumbling 6x9 folding camera.

There's nothing remarkable about the Crown Graphic -- it's a standard mid-twentieth century press camera. It's built like a tank and is designed to work quickly. The real star of the show is the Agfa Solinar lens. Designed only to cover the 6cm x 9cm image area of an Agfa Isolette folding camera, I was stretching the coverage of the lens by using it with my 4"x5" camera. On film of that size, the center is very sharp but rapidly degrades as you move to the corners of the image, creating a soft-focus vignette that emphasizes the subject at the center. The result is a beautiful image with sharpness where you want it and a creamy-soft margin that draws your eyes to the important bits.

Neither the Crown Graphic nor the Agfa lens cost much money. Both combined, they're far less expensive than an entry-level DSLR camera or even a high-end digital point and shoot. They're all just tools, and as photographers the specific tools we use aren't critical to the creative process. It's how we're able to effectively leverage these tools, through our craftsmanship and imagination, to create successful expressive photographs.

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Technical Data

I photographed Bedroom, Homer Noble Farm, Ripton, Vermont with a Graflex 4x5 Crown Graphic press camera and an Agfa 10.5cm ƒ/4.5 Solinar lens on Kodak TMax 100 (TMX) at EI 64. The exposure was approximately 1/8 second at ƒ/4.5. I developed the film in Kodak D-76 (1:1).

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