Giles Clement builds a working 16x20 wet-plate camera in 10 hours for $168

One Friday in early 2016, photographer Giles Clement sat in a coffee shop and did not want to answer any more email, so he went to a bar, ordered a pint and sketched a doodle of a giant camera on a napkin. He called his friend Zach, who stopped by an hour later, and the two went to Home Depot. The napkin drawing was not a plan; the camera took shape from what they found in the aisles: poplar for the back standard, pine for the rails, in-floor heating tube and dowels for the bellows supports, plywood for the lens board, and a $70 roll of 6-mil black plastic. Total materials came to $168.

The back standard, a simple 16x20 frame, came first and set the rest of the build; the rail underneath ran about five feet, the length Clement had calculated a portrait would need. His main worry was the bellows, the part people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on. His solution was telescoping supports on all four corners—1/2-inch plastic tube over 1/4-inch wood dowel—so the standards slide to focus while keeping the traditional large-format shape. The bellows only had to block light: four panels taped together and taped to the camera after two staple guns failed.

At 2am, tired but unwilling to wait for morning, Clement cleaned a piece of glass and poured a 16x20 collodion plate. With no time to build a film holder, the plan was to turn out the lights, walk the sensitized plate to the camera, fire the strobes and hope. A negative appeared, a little overexposed because rinsing such a big plate took longer but, in his words, "way better than I had expected." He made more plates over the following days and they kept improving; next on his list were a proper film holder and, if he found a bigger lens, a 20x24 camera.