I made a 4" digital back, and you can too

**Simon Liddiard** · 12-Aug-2013, 14:04

Originally Posted by TomR

It has 10cm of travel both left and right and up and down. What I do is move the camera left and right and up and down taking photos in a grid pattern to cover about 4" x 4" (10cm x 10cm) and stitch the photos together on the computer. Photoshop even has an automated feature that does this with little user input. The result is a photo over 100 megapixels that covers almost what a 4" x 5" negative would.

When I tried this with my Nikon D700 I was getting vignetting from the mirror box after only a few cm of travel. How are you getting 10cm, or were you overlapping sufficiently that the vignetting is removed in the stitching?

**TomR** · 12-Aug-2013, 14:43

I started with a full frame camera and moved to a crop sensor. The smaller sensor let me move farther before it would pick up the vignetting from the mirror box, but I still had to overlap a lot to get the full 10cm. Most of the time it wasn't worth it so I just stopped before 10cm. A mirrorless camera with a short flange distance would help a lot and I think solve most of the problems. Something like a Sony NEX would be perfect I think.