Beyond the Mousetrap: Building a Calotype-era Camera and Lens with Alan Greene

Beyond the Mousetrap: Building a Calotype-era Camera and Lens with Alan Greene

Date: September 22 & 23 | Saturday and Sunday
Time: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (1 hour lunch)
Location: 36 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016
Price: $395 + $40 Materials Fee

Since calotype paper negatives are often exposed in a dampened state, it becomes difficult to load them in modern film-holders and cameras without contamination.  Taking inspiration from Talbot’s early “mouse-trap” cameras and other calotype-era designs, we will use contemporary materials like foam-core and PVC tubing to build whole-plate format box-cameras equipped with simple lenses. Such cameras will be loaded with dampened sensitized paper without harm.  Subjects to be considered in the course of building our cameras and lenses will be determining image format relative to lens focal-length, determining the hyper-focal distance, composing without a ground-glass, and the visual effects of lens aberrations.

Limited to 8 participants

Instructor Biography

Alan Greene took up the calotype process in 1998 as a reaction to digital photography. This led to his writing a technical manual, Primitive Photography, published in 2001. In 2003-2004, his paper-negative photography was featured at the Palazzo Caffarelli and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, as part of their collaborative exhibit, Roma/Rome 1850. Since then, he has contributed to Etudes photographiques, the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, and the Vocabulaire technique de la photographie. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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