Three centuries of camera equipment...and a grain elevator

Smack dab in the middle of St. Joseph, Il is a huge concrete grain elevator. It sits along what is left of the railroad right of way (the tracks have been removed).

It is pretty much the focal point of the downtown, and can be seen from blocks away. Ever since moving to this area I've wanted to photograph the grain elevator. Last weekend I had my chance.

I brought along an assortment of camera gear: my wet plate camera, my 1916 Box Brownie and my digital camera. I wanted to see if I could make images with all three camera formats, of the same subject on the same day. Sort of a cross camera challenge.

Cameras are really just a tool, and I don't get too excited about the newest and greatest cameras out there. I mean, I use some pretty old technology and still get results from these older "obsolete" cameras. So it was fun to go from wet plate, to a box camera and finally to a digital camera with the same subject.

So to kick things off here is a wet plate image of the elevator. It took me four tries to get this plate, I was fighting white concrete against a white sky on a day where the sun was popping in and out of the clouds. This moment that I captured was when the sun was blocked by cloud cover. A quick 2 1/2 second exposure, 1/2 plate tintype:

 

Next on the list are a pair of images made with the box brownie. I was shooting Tri-X, so at 400 asa I as getting somewhere in the f11 to 16 range at 60th of a second. Luckily my fancy pants little cardboard camera has three stops to choose from, so I shot most of the elevator at f16. I framed it up in the wee little glass rangefinders and made some exposures:

And finally.... some digital images shot as tiffs in raw format, and converted to black and white. Digital is the easiest of all formats, and you end up taking more pictures than you really need. Luckily a lot of my other gear is slower paced, and it forces me to be a little less frame happy:

All in all it was a fun shoot, and I enjoyed making pictures with different cameras of the same subject. I think I kept things fairly consistent across the board, making the collection of images fairly equal and balanced no matter what camera was used. And I had fun, that is the most important part :)