I am writing this from Alaska, where I have been for a few weeks, and where I have just bought two Speed Graphics off a man on Craigslist. The 4x5 is coming back to the UK with me and is not getting touched on this trip, because I do not have any 4x5 holders out here and there is no point trying to shoot it before it is properly tested. The 3x4 is a different matter. It came with a Graflex 23 roll film back that takes 120, which means I can shoot it without buying anything else, as long as I can work out how to focus it. So I have spent a weekend in the kitchen making a ground glass out of Perspex from Home Depot, and I have taken the camera to a scrap yard in Chugiak and a bridge near the Knik Arm to find out if any of it works.
It does, more or less, and the results are really good.
The Craigslist story
The seller had put up bad photos, taken from the back of the cameras, of two folded objects he did not know the names of. The ad was at $20. He did not know what they were. I did, more or less. They looked like Speed Graphics to me, and the price was so wrong that I was not going to pay it even if it was a mistake.
I messaged him and went to meet him. He had a box of his late father-in-law’s photography stuff. In it were a 4x5 Speed Graphic in respectable condition, a 3x4 Speed Graphic in excellent condition, a Baby Speed Graphic and a pile of other bits I did not make a mental note of. I showed him how to open them and what they were, and gave him an honest sense of what they were worth on the second-hand market. I told him I wanted the 4x5 and the 3x4 and gave him a price for the pair that was a fair amount above what he was asking. I also explained that the cameras were untested so there was risk on my side.
I paid him more than $150 for the two. He was happy. I was happy. He kept the Baby Speed Graphic, because I told him what it was worth too, and I did not want to buy something I would only be cleaning up to flip when I got home.
This piece is about the 3x4. The 4x5 will get its own piece when I have done it the justice it deserves.
![PLACEHOLDER: the 3x4 Speed Graphic folded, on a kitchen table in Anchorage]
What a 3x4 Speed Graphic actually is
Speed Graphics were the standard press camera of the mid-twentieth century. Folding bed and fabric bellows, with a leaf shutter in the lens and a focal plane shutter behind it on the rear standard. You could shoot the leaf shutter for everyday work, or open the leaf wide and use the focal plane shutter behind it. The focal plane shutter was the headline feature in the model name, and it is also what lets you mount any old lens on the front, including bare brass barrel lenses with no shutter of their own. The body shutter handles the timing.
The 3x4 designation refers to the negative size. The full name is 3¼ × 4¼ inch, an old plate size that used to be called quarter plate, and the camera takes sheet film in that format. Production of the 3x4 Speed Graphic ran from the late 1920s up to 1955. The 4x5 version carried on into the 1970s and is the one most people picture when they hear the name. The 3x4 is rarer than its bigger sibling. It is also smaller and lighter, and noticeably easier to lift.
The back of mine carries a Graflex 23 roll film holder, which is a 120 back that takes eight frames of 6x9 cm per roll. Slide it into the Graflok back, advance the film with the knob, expose, repeat. It is a clean way to shoot 120 in a 3x4 body.
The focusing problem
A Speed Graphic has two ways to focus. The first is the rangefinder on the side of the body, linked to the front standard so that turning the focus knob also moves the rangefinder spot. Line up the two images of your subject in the rangefinder window and you are focused. In good condition this works very well. In sixty-year-old condition it sometimes does not.
The second way is the ground glass on the back. You open the rear panel, pull out the ground glass viewer, frame and focus on the projected image, then swap the ground glass out for your film back before you take the picture. This is slower and more deliberate. It is also absolutely accurate, if the ground glass sits at exactly the right distance from the lens.
The trouble is that my Graflex 23 back occupies that exact distance space. With the back attached, I cannot use the camera’s own ground glass viewer, because the film is sitting where the ground glass would be. I needed a ground glass that I could slide in and out of the back in the same way as the 23, so that the focus plane on the ground glass matches the focus plane of the film inside the roll back exactly.
So I made one.
Making a ground glass out of Perspex from a Home Depot
I did not have my usual camera-repair kit with me in Alaska. What I had was an afternoon to spare and a Home Depot a short drive away. The kitchen table would have to do as a workshop. I bought a sheet of clear Perspex and some sandpaper and started measuring.
The principle of a ground glass is straightforward. You need a translucent flat surface, sat at exactly the same distance behind the lens as the film plane will eventually be. The translucent surface catches the projected image so you can see it. The exact distance is the bit that matters. If your ground glass sits even half a millimetre off the right plane, what you see through the loupe will be in focus and what the film records will not.
The frosting was the easy bit. I sanded one face of the Perspex with progressively finer grits until it had the soft milky finish of a proper ground glass. The image projected onto it nice and clearly.
The hard bit was the thickness. I measured the distance between the inside face of the Graflok back and the film plane inside the 23 roll holder, and I built up the ground glass with several layers of Perspex glued together to land at exactly that thickness. Then a strip of tape across the top edge added the last fraction of a millimetre, because the layered Perspex came out very slightly under.
I tested it on a roll of HP5 in the living room before I committed to taking the camera anywhere. Two test shots, one focused with the rangefinder, one focused with the ground glass. Both came out sharp, the ground glass version slightly sharper. Good enough to go shooting with.
A note on what worked and what was a worry. The frosted side faces the lens. That is essential. If you put the smooth side toward the lens you get a useless reflective surface and a blurry projection on the wrong plane. The tape strip I used to fine-tune the thickness was the weakest part of the build. It worked at the start of the shoot, but by the end of the second day I noticed the ground glass was sliding into the back more easily than it had earlier, which probably means the tape was compressing under repeated insertion. So this fix is not permanent. When I get back to the UK I will rebuild the screen with proper Perspex layering and no tape at all.
![PLACEHOLDER: the homemade Perspex ground glass next to the Graflex 23 back, showing the frame marked on it]
A digression on flange distance
The other thing the test rolls confirmed is something I had already learned the hard way on the Bronica S2A. The flange distance, the distance between the lens flange and the film plane, has to be correct to a fraction of a millimetre or you will never get focus right. It does not matter how good your ground glass is or how careful you are with the rangefinder, if the film plane is even slightly out of position behind the lens, the focus you see is not the focus the film records.
On the Bronica I have spent more hours than I want to count chasing this problem. On the Speed Graphic it is essentially the same problem on a different camera. Get the ground glass at exactly the same distance as the film, and what you see is what you get. Get it wrong and you will be looking at sharp images on the ground glass and soft negatives at the end.
Hilltop Recycling, Chugiak
I drove about twenty-five minutes north from Anchorage up the Old Glenn Highway to a place called Hilltop Recycling in Chugiak. It is a salvage yard, family-owned and run by the Gardner family, trading there since 1960 as Alaska’s oldest auto recycling business. The yard is full of beaten-up cars and trucks, old farm machinery, all the things a salvage yard accumulates over more than half a century. I asked for permission to shoot and they said yes. I spent the afternoon working through Pan F 50 with my new ground glass.
Pan F at ISO 50 is a slow film, which means small apertures and longer shutter speeds, which is exactly what you want when you are learning a new camera. I metered for the middle grey of the trucks and set the lens at f/8 and the shutter at around a fiftieth of a second. Then I started working.
A note on shade. Pulling a dark cloth over your head is the proper way to view a ground glass in bright light, and I did not have a dark cloth. I had a jacket, which is the field equivalent. Even with the jacket, shooting toward the sun the ground glass was too washed out to compose on properly, so I framed by line of sight and trusted the rangefinder for the focus. Where the sun was behind me the projected image on the ground glass was clear enough to compose and focus. This is one of those things you only really learn from doing it.
I shot through the Pan F and switched to Portra 160. The first frame on the Portra was a double exposure by accident, because I had not advanced the film, which is a thing you can do with a roll back that you cannot do with a Speed Graphic’s normal sheet film holders. Lesson noted. The remaining frames on the Portra came out fine.
![PLACEHOLDER: Pan F 50 frame at Hilltop Recycling, beaten-up truck against the snow line]
![PLACEHOLDER: Portra 160 frame from the same shoot]
Knik Arm and a cold shutter
After the scrap yard I drove on to a bridge looking out over the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet. The arm was still mostly frozen, with a thin crust starting to show, and there were footprints from people who had walked across it earlier in the winter when the ice was thicker. Nobody was walking on it now. Alaska is melting, and you can see it in the thin shelf along the edges where open water used to be solid.
I framed the bridge with the camera up high on the tripod. I dropped the leaf shutter open and used the focal plane shutter behind it. A thirtieth of a second at f/32 for the bridge. The focal plane shutter on a Speed Graphic is curtains of black cloth and it makes a satisfying clack when it fires.
I noticed toward the end of the shoot that the leaf shutter on the lens was closing slowly. By the time I packed up it was sticking on the longer speeds, which I am putting down to old grease in the shutter going gummy in the cold. Back in a warm room later it ran cleanly again. I will give it proper attention when I am back in the UK and the temperatures are higher, but it is worth knowing about. Pre-war and immediately post-war shutters with original lubrication will slow down in cold weather, and a Speed Graphic shoot at minus anything is going to test them.
![PLACEHOLDER: Portra 160 frame of the bridge over the Knik Arm]
How the results came out
The negatives are sharp and properly exposed, which is the headline. The ground glass clearly works. Both of the Hilltop frames came back with the focus on the right plane, and the Knik Arm bridge is sharp from end to end at f/32. I am really pleased.
The Graflex 23 back also performed without fuss. Eight frames per roll, advance is firm and locks at each exposure, the dark slide slides cleanly. For a sixty-year-old roll back from a salvage box on Craigslist that is a result.
The double exposure on the first Portra frame was my fault, not the camera’s. The cold-shutter issue on the leaf shutter is the camera’s fault, sort of, but really the fault of the lubricant inside it from whenever it was last serviced. Probably 1960.
What this opens up
Two things this camera now lets me do that I could not do before.
The first is barrel lenses. The Speed Graphic’s focal plane shutter means I can mount any lens on the front of it, including the old brass barrel lenses I have been collecting and have nothing to put them on. With the body shutter handling the timing, the lens itself does not need a shutter at all. There is a piece coming on the brass lens collection once they have been tested. The 3x4 will need its own lens board mount to take a barrel lens, but once that is sorted, this becomes a portrait camera.
The second is front standard movements. Speed Graphics have rise and fall on the front standard, plus shift. You can use the rise and fall to straighten verticals on tall buildings or to control the plane of focus on a flat subject. The shift lets you correct for shooting up at something from below. None of this matters much when you are working at sunny f/22 in a scrap yard, but it opens up a kind of large format work that the Bronica simply cannot do.
The big sister camera, the 4x5 Speed Graphic from the same Craigslist deal, will get the full treatment when I am home. The Bronica S2A is also throwing focus problems again because of course it is, so there is another video on me chasing that one too. The Speed Graphics, the Bronica, the Pentacon Six on the shelf next to them, the Holga that has just arrived. There is a queue.
Bodge job verdict
The Perspex ground glass was a bodge job built in a kitchen with a sheet of plastic from a Home Depot and some sandpaper. It worked. It is not the permanent solution, and the tape strip in particular is on borrowed time, but it got me through a weekend of shooting in Alaska without sending the camera back unsharpened. For anyone who finds themselves in the same position, it is achievable. The two things you have to get right are the thickness and the frosted face direction. Everything else is just careful cutting.
The 3x4 Speed Graphic itself is a nice camera. Smaller and lighter than the 4x5, useful image circle, the same focal plane shutter, the same front standard movements. If you find one in working condition at a fair price, it is worth picking up. Mine cost me less than $100 of the $150 I paid for the pair, and that includes a working Graflex 23 roll back, which on its own goes for fifty or sixty pounds in the UK.
Sometimes the man on Craigslist does not know what he has. Sometimes he does, and the price is honest. The trick is being able to tell the difference and being prepared to pay when you find it.