El Gordo

El Gordo is a big beast, a 12×16″ (ULF) camera with an unusual Wray 10 3/4″ wide angle lens on a tilt/swing mount.  It covers 12×16″ at portrait distances, but vignettes a bit in the far corners at infinity focus.  The 273mm lens is equivalent to around 21mm on a ‘full frame’ camera, so very wide, but this also makes the camera quite compact for this format.   El Gordo has similar dimensions to a mini fridge when fully extended, and yet it’s surprisingly light-weight and portable.  It fits inside Pete’s bicycle trailer with everything needed to take one photo.  It was always meant for shooting paper negatives, so the shutter is a rise-and-fall type, and the holder takes a graduated neutral density filter to bring down brightness in the sky.  Photographic paper has a rather limited dynamic range and to get decent images, which can be extremely sharp, measures need to be taken to reduce contrast.  

Taking this out on the road is a real adventure.  Choose your subject carefully, you have one shot!  If you’d like to learn about shooting paper negatives (way cheaper than large format film!), and have a go with El Gordo, Contact Pete for one of his bespoke courses.