{"id":812616,"date":"2026-10-24T17:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T17:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812616\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T17:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T17:14:10","slug":"photographer-wins-major-monochrome-award-using-massive-95-year-old-wooden-camera-the-camera-itself-weighs-45-pounds-20kg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812616\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer wins major monochrome award using massive 95-year-old wooden camera. ‘The camera itself weighs 45 pounds \/ 20kg’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua YeheNara<\/a>, who specializes in the wet plate collodion process and large-format film photography, was crowned Photographer of the Year at the 2026 Exposure One Awards for a series of black-and-white frames he shot on an 11×14 Deardorff studio camera.<\/p>\n

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Produced by the L.F. Deardorff Camera Company in Chicago between the 1930s and 1980s, the 11×14 Deardorff Studio Camera (also called the S11) is a heavy-duty large-format rig for professional portraiture, commercial illustration, and wet-plate collodion photography.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe camera itself weighs 45 pounds, while its original studio stand weighs approximately 350 pounds,\u201d said YeheNara.<\/p>\n

Deardorff cameras were designed to be modular, with an interchangeable back component \u2013 where the film is held \u2013 enabling shooting with different film sizes. Yehenara explained that he captured his award-winning images on Ilford<\/a> Delta 100 black-and-white film, mounted within a 10×14-inch back.<\/p>\n

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Joshua YeheNara owns three Deardorff studo cameras, an 11×14-inch S11 along with two modified (8×20-inch and 11\u00d728-inch) panoramic cameras (Image credit: Joshua YeheNara)<\/p>\n

According to the photographer, Deardorff studio cameras are incredibly rare, with \u201cfewer than 350\u201d ever made. Yet somehow, YeheNara has managed to acquire three of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found the first one on the Facebook Marketplace and purchased [it] from a collector in Massachusetts for $4,500,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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While one of the models is a standard S11, Yehenara explained that the other two have been modified to make them panoramic. \u201cThe 8×20 and 11×28 [-inch] backs were custom-made for me by the previous owner,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am currently the only known photographer to own both an 8\u00d720-inch and an 11\u00d728-inch panoramic Deardorff studio camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yehenara\u2019s winning frames at the Exposure One Awards came from a series called Zen-Organic Photography for the Digital Age. You can see his winning images, along with all commended images from this year\u2019s contest, on the Exposure One Awards website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s our in-house analog expert Seb Oakley\u2019s take on the best film cameras<\/a>. Seb, who mostly shoots monochrome, also has a roundup of the best cameras for black-and-white photography<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter A New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-812616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}