low end digital...

[redwoodtwig]

I've taken the plunge back into LF. I played with a Linhof Technika when stationed in Germany years ago and essentially stopped doing much photography for nearly 20 years. I went into digital and am finding the "full frame" digital cameras with good glass can make really good prints. But I missed the 4x5 quality.

A local camera store was going out of business and I bought their old rental 4x5, a Calumet with one 150mm rodenstock lens and a very long rail. I found an adaptor plate on ebay and got that. I went to a machine shop with a drawing and had some clamps worked up. I then had to go into my workshop and modify them, but now I have a functioning set up that uses the view camera for lens and movements and a digital camera to make the exposure. Exposures, plural, since I need to use the shift plate on the adapter to move the digital camera to the various places in the plane of focus I want to capture.

Maybe not the best way to do this, but more affordable than any of the digital backs out there. Biggest problem is that the sensor plane is about an inch and a half behind where the ground glass would have gone, so the 150mm lens needs to be in a recessed lens board and nearly all the way back...

[Vick Vickery]

Welcome to group therepy. As you've found, there are some disadvantages to such a setup, mainly that you can't very well use short lenses (being limited to about 150mm in your case) but its still interesting to play with...I did something similar a while back with a 35mm body on my Cambo 4x5. I find I don't use it often, but sometimes its fun! I suspect that you'll eventually shoot more 4x5 film on that camera than digital; the camera and lens are both very workable pieces of equipment.