For this picture I used a different homemade reticle: an attempt to make thinner lines that were more likely to disappear.
| The "Mark III" Reseau Plate | ||
I cut out a 60 x 23 mm piece of celluloid (from a candy jar), then scored and folded down the edges to make a 23 x 35 mm plate over the film. The "Mark III" is in the foreground, ready to go in the camera. Note the diagonal cuts, and the opaque section behind the two folds from the reinforcing tape.
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Popping the plate into the camera. You can see the thin diagonal lines I'd cut with an X-Acto knife. I'd tried to darken the lines by drawing over them with water-soluble ink then washing away the excess. But the ink washed out from the cuts as well. However, you can see I still got some pretty good lines from the shadows of the cuts.
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Measure twice, cut once. I'd made the support sides too long, then re-cut them too short. The result was the plate didn't fit snugly against the film, so the lines came out a bit blurry and thick. But even these thick lines still went behind the flagpole. If I could have cut 1 micron lines, the results would have been spectacular.
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Don't have a camera? You can get an idea of light spillover by holding a piece of thread in front of your eye. It will blur around the edges, and might disappear under bright light. The illusion even works with shoelaces.
Of course the string-in-your-face experiment does not duplicate a true Reseau plate, which is inside the camera. That's the equivalent of having the hair directly in front of your optic nerve, which would require some delicate surgery. I'm afraid I can't help you there.