The Hercules
The Hercules is a wonderful steam tug built in 1904, lovingly restored in the seventies and eighties and now moored at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. On my most recent visit I went with several other large format photographers so we made a conspicuous bunch, but fortunately visitation was light in the middle of January. I thought the perfect camera for the job was my Ritter 8x10, a light weight large format camera which can take very wide (120mm) and very long (800mm) lenses. Perched on the bobbing back decks of the ferryboat Eureka I just managed to take this picture of the fair Hercules. There was some vignetting of the image at the bottom so I went with the flow and gave the image a vintage look in post processing.
Taking the vintage look another step, I decided to print the image using the Platinum / Palladium process using a digital negative. In fact, I ended up making 20 more copies of the print for a folio exchange on the Large Format Photography Forum. This gave be a great chance to get used to my new Arista UV Lightsource - 20"x24", a really excellent unit and quite reasonable at $699.00. I'll probably write up an equipment review of the box fairly soon.