All about my Stereo Camera!

Hello! Now that I have made my blog post about my 3D-Con experience and introducing stereo-tintypes to my art and business, doing a picture blog post about my camera only seems fit. 
After doing some research on the camera, I have speculated that its an E&H Anthony Champion Field Camera, which was produced 1890-1895. Is originally was used to for 4x5 or 5x7 dry plates, but my friend Dave modified the back for wet plate.
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We keep a ground glass paper mat inside the camera to help composition before we take the tintype.

My plate holder! Also made by Dave. Inside the plate holder we have home-made plate inserts that are made out of acrylic and silver wire.

These two sets of Darlot lenses is what we mainly use for stereo-tintype portraiture.

We have another set of lenses for the stereo camera and they are also Darlot lenses but they are a rapid rectilinear lenses.

Each of the lenses came with their original brass lens caps. After a few test tries we realized that taking off each individual lens cap kept shaking the camera and each side of the picture had not close enough exposure time. My dad and I did some research and found different ways photographers made shutters for their cameras. We decided to do a simple flap shutter with knobs on each end for easy turning .Picture demonstration of the flap shutter my dad and I built.
As you have probably notice, we have our waterhouse stops in front of the glass of the lens. The Darlot lenses are too early to have slots for apertures! On its own is was an f/3 and we had a hard time getting really anything in focus, so we decided to make an f/5.6 waterhouse stop out of the same materials as the plates we use. It does cause some vignetting, but personally I like it. Also most of it gets cut out when we assemble a portrait into our mattes

Last but not least, we had to make a darkcloth special for this camera. When I received my first wet plate camera many years ago it came with an antique darkcloth with a hole cut out towards the end of the drape for the lens to stick through. I took this idea and got some black non see through cloth and cotton fabric to go on top and had an oblong shape cut in the fabric. Its really useful when wind is blowing and you don't have to hassle with clips! 
If you enjoyed these types of blog posts, let me know! 

Camera uncovered

Darkcloth with flap shutter combined.