The biggest enlargement ever
made from a 35mm frame was a picture by Ernst Haas which was used for the Kodak Colorama at Grand Central Station in New York City. That brings up the question of what the
largest picture ever made might be. A
little research rendered the following result:
The largest picture ever was
made with what is certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest
camera in existence. It is basically an
old hangar building at the disused El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Southern
California, which has been made light tight to ensure no light gets in except
through a little pinhole in one side of the hangar. To create the image which
is described as "The Great Picture", a huge sheet of made-to-order
canvas was suspended inside the hangar and coated with 80 liters of a liquid
photo emulsion made by Liquid Light. This
made the entire canvas photosensitive.
The exposure time of the
world's largest camera was set to approximately 35 minutes, after which the
canvas was developed in a pool of 2300 liters of developer. Needless to say, photography at this scale
does not come cheap! The world's largest
photo was 313 square meters (3375 square feet) in size. That compares to a standard 35mm film frame
of 24 x 35 millimeters, which equals 8.64 square centimeters, or 0.00864 square
meters.
While this is certainly a
very impressive achievement, the camera is definitely quite limited in terms of
subject matter.
In 1900, the Chicago &
Alton Railway decided that they wanted a mural of their Alton Limited train to
hang on the wall of their headquarters.
There was no suitable enlarging equipment available at this time. Virtually all photographs were contact
printed, meaning that the negative needed to be of the size of the final
print. To solve this problem, they hired
the J. A. Anderson Company of Chicago to build what turned out to be the
largest, portable camera ever. The
camera weighed 900 pounds and was designed to take photographs on an 8 x 4.5
foot photographic plate, which added another 500 pounds to the weight of the
camera. An exposure time of 2 ½ minutes
was necessary to take the photograph.
This was the largest photograph ever until “The Great Picture” was taken
many years later.
The Alton Limited train
picture taken with the Mammoth Camera
What does this have to do
with Leica? Basically nothing, but it is
interesting to see what efforts have been taken by some to go into the opposite
direction of Oskar Barnack when he designed the Leica. It is interesting to note though that the railroad picture could easily have been taken with a Leica, considering that the Kodak Colorama image by Ernst Haas had a dimension of 18 x 60 feet, making the railroad picture of 8 x 4.5 feet rather small in comparison. Of course the difference in camera size is much greater, and the first Leica was designed by Oskar Barnack just a scant 13 years after the Mammoth camera.
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Please make payment
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