Last Saturday we stumbled unwittingly into Art-A-Whirl in support of our friend Paul Johnson’s new photography magazine, Leaf Shutter. As part of the festivities, photographer Victor Keller had an old school camera set up and was taking portraits.
The camera he used was a refurbished Deardorff 8×10 (V8) view camera commonly used in the portrait studios in the 1930s-50s. It looked like something out of the 1860s, a square, boxish thing, complete with the black sheet the photographer hides under to take the picture. It had a pretty long exposure, so we had to stay perfectly still for two to three seconds.
When Victor finished he took us into the dark room to develop the picture, giving us the whole experience.
The best part was when he took a picture of the developed print using an iPhone and emailed it to us, turning the old school experience into a thoroughly modern one.
Check out the entire series of Victor’s Art-A-Whirl portraits.
