Unpopular's Chinese View Camera (hypothetical)

unpopular

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I miss correcting perspective without having to debate if it's better to extrapolate or crop. I miss selective DOF without having to make sloppy, approximated depth maps using often silly fake bokeh. And most important, I miss being able to get everything in sharp focus at f/4 (yes, it's possible and by far the best part of using a view camera).

Hasselblad and 35mm t/s adapters are fine. T/S lenses are of course available. And these will get everything I want done, but still i'd be lacking both front and rear movements.

I was thinking. What if you took *two* tilt shift adapters and mounted them onto a mirrorless camera?

If you take a Fuji XF to Nikon F tilt/shift adapter, and to that a Nikon F to Hasselblad Bayonet t/s adapter, you should still have 17.7mm to adapt some sort of printed or machined tripod interface between them. Or use a bellows set for a really interesting macro setup without infinity focus.

Moreover, if you use two nikon adapters and an M42 to Nikon adapter without corrective glass, and then mount a copal to M42 adapter within that you could place a bellows set in between them and maybe (provided there is no mechanical interference) use modern lenses, like the APO-Digitar. Yep, a $5,000 lens on a sub-$1000 Chinese hodgepodge!

Ok, So maybe wide angle lenses aren’t really rational (and this may defeat the whole purpose for architectural work) but what are your thoughts on this crazy mess? It’d certainly be small.
 
Personally, I think it would be a lot cheaper and easier to put a scanning back on a 4x5 camera! To be honest, I can't say; I don't know enough about all of the gear to know if it would work, or how well it would work, but your theory sounds good to me... I think.
 
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They're not cheap - 'though a few years ago I remember reading an interesting article about a fellow who had modified a flatbed scanner to work as a scanning back for a large-format camera. The results were surprisingly good, and the total cost, IIRC was <$2K.
 
Not too long ago, I saw an on-line web blog post about a Fuji GS680 made into a technical camera...it was kind of interesting, and as you probably know, those old tanks are low-cost on the used market. I'm not sure about what you hope to achieve, exactly, but that Fuji seemed to be a pretty good platform for making a relatively affordable technical camera.

I think it might have been from THIS guy's blog...not sure...I recently transferred a bunch of my Photography DLs 2014 to my backup drive, which is offline right now.


http://www.filephotography.gr/medium-format-camera-finally-picked/
 
^^as you know, this has definitely been something I've dreamt about... plumber style

I kind of recall though some nonsense about the back having to be attached in order to work???
 
I 'think' with the right lens, something like a short mount or bellows lens, maybe an enlarging lens, that the "back" could be a Nikon F-mount epoxied of screwed to a plate that fits the rear standard of the Fuji. I SAW a video of how this GS680 worked, using the rear standard to do multi-shot stitches, and the back was am FX Nikon d-slr mounted on a plate that fit the Fuji body's rear standard. There might have been, I cannot recall, an extension tube involved, to get more clearance for the handgrip on the Nikon body.

I agree with the idea that some FRONT tilt would be sweeeeeeeet for some Scheimpflug action, getting deep DOF at wider f/stops, and some rear standard movements would also be nice for architectural work.

I think that today, the BEST solution though, would be to buy a used medium format CCD back that's say 8 to 10 years old, from one of the "big dealers" in these things, like Capture Integration in Atlanta, let's just say. And then, use THAT back modified to fit on an actual view camera or a camera like the GS680. The modification of a flatbed scanner to a view camera that Tirediron mentioned--I saw that blogged about some years back...it looked like quite the DIY project, and a bit awkward, yet, the results were pretty good; however, TODAY, used MF backs are muuuuuuch less costly than they were back in those days. Some of the older Kodak 6-MP backs are actually under $1,000 used, always.
 
If you take a Fuji XF to Nikon F tilt/shift adapter, and to that a Nikon F to Hasselblad Bayonet t/s adapter, you should still have 17.7mm to adapt some sort of printed or machined tripod interface between them. Or use a bellows set for a really interesting macro setup without infinity focus.

or just using a bellows out of its guides, adding some externally machined support with more degrees of freedom?
 
They're cool, don't get me wrong, but they're also kind of 20th century technology.
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What 21st century technology do you use to replicate the end result?

Joe
 
You could probably use a technique like focus stacking to simulate wiggles. Light field cameras can presumably calculate what plane of focus you want. Not even planar if you don't want it. In theory. It's a mere matter of writing some software.
 
They're cool, don't get me wrong, but they're also kind of 20th century technology.
01.jpg

First of all, no, you cannot get everything in focus at a wide aperture without front tilt or focus stacking. Focus stacking is one solution, but it's hardly very practical. Correcting perspective CAN be done in post, but you're faced with the dilemma of having to either crop or interpolate and even still isn't always 100% physically accurate. If you know what you're doing, you can adjust perspective WAY faster with way fewer issues on a view camera than you could in post.

As for focus stacking, that isn't very practical, and light field isn't even really available, at least beyond a parlor trick. As for "writing some software" well, my multi-dimensional calculus skills are a little bit rusty these days.
 
Do you need an accurate depth map to do perspective correction in post properly? I can't quite see the geometry right now. Again, light field would be the digital answer.

I approve of physical wiggles, myself, but the digital version is an interesting problem.
 
Um...guys??? Wfhilliam is a bot that just copied a line from post #3, written by unpopular. It's been showing up in several threads and has been reported already but not removed yet.
 
LOL - I didn't even recognize that was me talking about scanning backs!!
 
Do you need an accurate depth map to do perspective correction in post properly? I can't quite see the geometry right now. Again, light field would be the digital answer.

I approve of physical wiggles, myself, but the digital version is an interesting problem.

Oh, I agree that light field is the future of photography. No doubt about that at all in my mind. But we're just not there yet.

I mean, we can dream about solid state tunable lenses that you just download any configuration and load it into a chunk of glass, too. Surely that will be a reality as well. But until it is, it's not really a viable option.
 

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