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Bill Hao’s Enormous Camera

ARTIFACT: A BC photographer shows us how to get bigger, better, ever-so-slightly unwieldy pictures.

Olamide Olaniyan 14 Apr 2022TheTyee.ca

Olamide Olaniyan is associate editor at The Tyee. Follow him on Twitter @olapalooza.

The biggest camera you’ve ever seen travels around B.C. in photographer Bill Hao’s bus.

Hao’s favourite places to travel with his camera are the Rocky Mountains and the I-93, but he also loves the Sea to Sky, highways 1, 5 and 3, Salt Spring Island and Vancouver Island.

The images and videos Hao posts on his Instagram page suggest an incredible road trip. You peer over his shoulders as the towering rocks and evergreen trees that make up the Rockies whip by on the highway. Chinese folk songs and ballads play on as the soundtrack to his adventure.

Hao’s giant, homemade camera appears in nearly every photo he posts. There’s no roll of film involved — instead he exposes his images unto a glass plate that stretches across his body’s wingspan. It takes three large tripods to hold the thing in place and the entire setup is a head taller than he is. At full size, the camera grows to 70 inches long.

It’s the kind of instrument that makes a photography categorization like “large-format” — which typically describes film sizes around four by five inches large — a bit less meaningful.

Hao’s Instagram, active since 2018, is dotted with photos of park benches, rock faces, trees and other forms of still life, many of which were taken on his much smaller camera, which he made in 2015 and which features 11 by 11 inch plates. He has taken over a hundred ambrotype glass plate pictures with this camera.

But the wet plate pictures cannot be copied or enlarged, so in order to get bigger pictures, he needs a bigger camera.

In 2019, he decided to make one himself. Things escalated quickly.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

The collodion wet plate process Hao relies on requires the image to be immediately developed in a large portable darkroom.

If you want to take portraits, Hao told The Tyee, it’s relatively straightforward to keep a large camera like this in a studio or at home. But Hao wanted to go off the grid and get photos of landscapes across the country. He needed the camera to be portable and wanted to be able to operate it without assistance.

So, over the course of about eight months between 2020 and 2021, he modified a bus to an RV with a darkroom.

“I needed a very big mobile darkroom with lots of equipment, chemical liquid, water, electric,” he said.

Hao’s videos on Instagram show him quickly lugging hefty glass plate over to his waiting Prevost bus/portable darkroom.

“A huge plate is so difficult to develop within 20 seconds,” he said.

851px version of BillHaoWetplateRockies.jpg
851px version of BillHaoWetplateRockiesSkyBW.jpg
The Canadian Rockies, as taken by Bill Hao's enormous camera. Images courtesy of Bill Hao.

If you look at enough of Hao’s videos and photos — I’ve seen every single one — you begin to feel another presence just offscreen and out of the shot, documenting Hao as he runs through the process time after time. I asked Hao who this person was.

“She is my wife, we have been married 23 years,” he said.

Hao and his wife Crystal met as classmates in high school, and they’re often together. She also performs some of the background music in his videos. “She loves songs,” he tells me.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bill Hao Wetplate Collodion (@hao.bill)

So what keeps this person in a tangerine jumpsuit going when his art form requires repeating an extremely technical, cumbersome and arcane task over and over? The answers can be found in his pictures: dark and haunted hues, stunning detail, the occasional charming, noticeably analog imperfection.

“I’m not saying that the old process is better than digital. Of course, today’s digital technology is simple, fast and great,” Hao said. “But for me, the image capture techniques of the old days, especially the wet collodion process, offer better quality, more tone, more detail and a larger format. An image made with the old process looks more realistic, closer and can be preserved for longer.”

“More importantly, I like it, and I think you will too.”  [Tyee]

Read more: Art, Media, Environment

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