How to Load Film in a 4 x 5 Camera

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni. I am a professional photographer from Austin, Texas. I'm going to talk about how to load your film into your camera, into your large format 4x5 camera. Back here is what is called the back, OK? It's a spring and a door. This opens up like so. Again, you want to be gentle with it. You don't want to force anything. Never a good idea in photography to force anything open or closed. Always a bad move. I speak from experience. So once it's open you're going to take your 4x5 film holder that's loaded with film and you're going to slide it in there and it's a perfect fit. It's snug. Now if you think about the way this camera works, you want that film back in there just right because it rests right on the spot where your ground glass is. So that is the way that you load it. Now the next step is pulling out the dark slide and you want to pull out the slide that's closest to the lens. When I first started using these cameras, again, I was in a rush, I was excited, I would pull the wrong one. I couldn't understand why I wasn't getting any exposures. Pull it out, trip your shutter, take your picture. One handy little trick that I learned early on was that these holders have a black part and a silver part. Some have a white part and a silver part. After I made my exposure, I would take the black part and put it, I would flip it so I know that that part was exposed. Cause again, it's real easy to double expose stuff. So I want to take it out and I flip it and then I expose the other sheet. Pull it out. You want to make sure that you pull this out all the way too. It's very easy to pull them out like halfway or something. That's going to mess up your image. It opens up like that. When I have shot two of these, I put them in my bag. There's a shot spot and a not shot spot. Again, I'm always trying to not double expose, trying to keep some kind of order in what I'm doing. And that is how you load the 4x5 camera."