I was in the middle of building my 4x5 plate holder when I decided, why not build a 8x10 plate holder and just build a reduction adapter. That way you can do any size from 8x10 down without having to build a different size camera and plate holder for your different size plates you may use.

What I dont get is how do it.
Doesnt the focusing plate have to be the same distance from the lens to the front of the wetplate and if you put and reduction adaptor in the holder wont the distance of the spacing from lens to glass going to be off with your focusing glass?

Hope that makes sense.

Does anyone have pictures or a How-to- site on how these reduction adaptors are made so I can get some idea?

Thanks for your help

Delta



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/2012 07:43AM by deltafour.

If you make an 8x10 insert with small pieces on plexi on the 4 corners to the front of the camera to hold the plate. These 4 corners will also hold the 8x10 reduction insert cut to 4x5 or whatever size you wish. The front of the reducer also has 4 corners and they ARE on the same plain as an 8x10 plate would be.


Think about it or draw it out and you will see the distance between plate and lens is the same.

In this picture you can see the base of the reducing adapter sits on the routed interior rabbetted edge of the holder. Normally, the front surface (i.e., facing the lens) of a larger plate would be coincident with that routed plane. The acrylic adapter has strips that form the triangular supports in the corners to rest the smaller plates upon. These acrylic strips are glued to the front surface (i.e., facing the lens) of the adapter which is resting on the same plane that the front surface of the larger glass plates would occupy. You could even nest another small adapter of similar construction and it would still have the even smaller plate on the same plane.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/2012 11:55PM by smieglitz.

These are a set of original reducers from a camea dating probably to the 1870s, definitely a wet collodion camera, but, as the frames show, it had hardly been used.



!0x8 to 1/4 plate.

Seán



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 07:47AM by sean.

That is pretty cool, Sean!

Jason Kladiva
Mackinac Island, MI

THANK YOU, THANK YOU,THANK YOU RobertSzabo, Smieglitz and Seán!


Thats exactly what I needed


Delta

yeah sean that is pretty cool
not many real wetplate holders
left
yours is a beautiful example.

I sold the the camera several years ago with a set modern reducers with silver wire corners for every day use.

I didn't want to part the originals from the camera but I felt that the original set were far too important to use, the set must be unique outside of major museum collections.

See the original posting, October 12th.2010, "Marvelous find" where the whole thing is posted in great detail.

Seán