The Saturday after the exhibition opening we had an Open Studios day at Leigh Spinners Mill. Artists and creatives on floor 3 and 4 opened their doors to the public to show what they all get up to with their own art practice. This coincided with my friend and fellow photographer Moo Pa visiting and bringing along a camera I had bought at auction.
The auction house was fairly close to him so he did me a huge favour by collecting it, neither of us realised the actual size of it though…
It’s another Hunter Penrose?? process camera. This one has a ground glass of 15×18 inches, so just a baby one. This will be the fourth I’ve owned over the years. The last I sold on to Maris in Latvia and always regretted it as that one was in lovely condition
This one was worth a gamble and I got it for a silly price, even when I was unsure what condition it was going to be in. It came with a decent Cooke Anastigmat Series XIV 420mm (16. 1/2 inch) f6.3 lens I’ll probably sell that on. Giving it a quick look over the camera is not too bad. The bellows need a little bit of work and it needs a really good clean. The plate holder has a machined metal plate fixed in place so it took us a few minutes to figure out how to put it to use without much fettling. Paper negatives seemed the obvious way forward.
We swapped out the Cooke lens and added in a Dallmeyer 4D just out of curiosity. It’s friction mounted into the thick lens panel. Focusing is a little tricky as the number of turns of the focus mechanism seemed high to the level the sharpness changed. There’s a spiral rod for rear and front focus but there’s also one for front rise and fall which previous versions never had.
The dark cloth was one I use for my portable darkroom, and when not in use sat nicely on the leaky bellows. The ground glass/rear of the camera hinges upwards with a counter balance, my previous versions all hinged to the left. So that’s a little different. Also I there’s no camera stand this big so its siting on top of a wheeled plan chest for now.
There’s also a tape measure added to the inside and along the focus rail, I’m assuming as some sort of standardisation for focus and magnification. Its a bit rusty so not much use butt I’ll leave it in place.
It didn’t take long to get it ready for the Open Day and between cups of tea we were ready after lunch. It was a fairly bright day but it was still about 10 seconds for exposures, remember the Dallmeyer 4D is about f6 and photo paper rated about ISO 3 or 6. We were using fairly old 12×16 inch Ilford Warmtone Pearl RC paper.
We had plenty of visitors to my studio, there’s lots of interesting stuff to see, I guess, but this whopper of a camera got a lot of interest and sitters.
Adding the paper negs to the studio door was a good idea, drawing in even more visitors to see what was going on. I think I’ll do this again on the next Mill Open Day on the 1st of November.
So all in all a very enjoyable but tiring day. If your ever in the area, and my door is open, please do call in and say hello.
A huge thank you to Moo Pa for collecting the camera, and Jay for helping to store it, and then again to Moo Pa for driving it all the way here from Devon. Thank you.