The 3D printed Blackriver 4x5 View Camera

To start in wet plate photography you need the basic chemicals, plates and a working camera. The size of the images you want to make determines the size of the film/plate holder and ultimately the size of the camera. 

I thought 4x5 inches would be a good size to start as the plates & chemicals required are less expensive and I could afford to make more mistakes! ( I was assured there would be many while I learnt, they weren't wrong )

While there are deals to be found for large format camera if you want one straight away they can cost from $300 to, well ... as much as you would like to pay.

I didn't really like the sound of waiting around till I found a deal so I paged through Thingiverse till I found the BlackRiver 4x5 View Camera v1.0

There were a lot of parts that had to be printed accurately but I decided to give it a try.

 

My BlackRiver 4x5 View Camera

There were some mechanical parts which had to be purchased but they were also
used in 3D printers and were available at a modest price. Binder clips were used to secure parts together which might need to be changed or rearranged and standard metric nuts and bolts completed the build.

To save expense with the lens I acquired a Russian lens via Ebay without a shutter since the exposure times with wet plate are long enough that they can be timed by hand using the lens cap to uncover and cover the lens.

My 4x5 plate holder

Since this camera was designed for film I needed a plate holder that would suit the thicker aluminum or glass plates I planned to use. 

Again Thingiverse came to the rescue and provided plans for a 4x5 plate holder, after a few modifications to improve its light-tightness its been working well.

It turned out that the 3D printed dark slide could not completely block full sunlight and I ended up using a trimmed down Graflex dark slide