A New Camera - A Box

After thinking long and hard about hanging my Bender 4x5 from a kite line, I came to the conclusion that it's probably not such a great idea for a couple of reasons: First, the real strength of the Bender is that it is a full-movement monorail. With the camera up in the air, I wouldn't be able to use the movements and they wouldn't be of much advantage anyway. Another is that even at four pounds the Bender is heavier than my current kite rig by a lot. So a lighter 4x5 would be better from the standpoint of not having to get kites with higher pull. Finally, the whole focus issue doesn't exist at altitude: Set the focus to 200' or so and stop down enough to make sure you have usable focus out to infinity. Done.

To make a long story short, I'm going to make a 4x5 camera for KAP. It needs to be light, it needs to be strong, it needs to be able to hang upside-down from a kite, and it needs to be able to hold my Fuji 150mm lens the right distance from the film plane. So I'm going to make a box.

More precisely I'm going to make a trapezoidal box out of 1/16" aircraft plywood with 1/8" reinforcements at the edges and corners. 100% glued construction, black paint inside, tung oil finish outside (same as the Bender). It'll take a 4"x4" Bender lens board and a standard 4x5 film holder (I use a mix of Leica and Fidelity Elite, but the form factor is functionally equivalent.) I'd like the whole thing to come in under 700g including the Picavet suspension.

Why go to the trouble? For starters I really love 4x5 negatives, but I've already made that point. An even more forceful reminder came up in the past few days. Someone asked me to price out some canvas prints of some of my KAP images. 24"x36" is about as big as I can print a full-frame shot from the Nikon Coolpix 5600 I'm using. It's a 6MP camera.

By way of comparison, the Cliff Palace negative, scanned at 1200 DPI, can be printed at 114x88. Since I haven't hit the limit of the film with my scan, chances are that can be improved by a lot with a higher resolution scan (I can scan up to 4800 DPI). And since my Fuji 150mm lens is good for both color and black and white, it opens up a whole bunch of options for prints of both kinds. (Though I shudder to think how much a canvas print would be at those sizes!)

I hope it turns out as nice as my Bender did. I'm not much of a woodworker, but this should give me a chance to use my scroll saw on wood, for a change, and maybe wind up with a new KAP tool in the end.

Tom