I bought my Shen Hao 4x5 at the 2nd Annual Large Format Photography Conference in Monterey, CA last year. It's my first large format camera (I've been using Nikon and Mamiya RZ67 before that purchase). After a few days of playing with the camera and shooting without real film for practice, I put the camera aside in my hallway closet, protected in a lunch bag I found at Target that fits the camera perfectly. Now, the reason I chose the hallway closet as opposed to my bedroom closet is because the bedroom closet gets warm during the daytime while the hallway one remains cool.
Fast forward a year to this month when I have more free time and decide to pull the camera out to actually use it. I want to shoot polaroid to learn how to properly use this "new" piece of equipment, so I went on Ebay and bought a used Polaroid 545i film holder, which doesn't seem to fit properly (chronicle here). After much tinkering with the polaroid film holder and my Lisco film holders (8 of them, bought used too), I discover that one piece of wood that makes up one side of the film holder gate is peeling away from the camera back at the glue interface! I live in San Francisco. The weather here is neither too hot nor too cold. It's just about perfect (to me anyway) most of the time. The camera hasn't seen one piece of film through it. This is quite disconcerting!
I just contacted Jim at Midwest Photo Exchange and am waiting for his reply. I like my Shen Hao. It's a nice little thing of a camera, has all the movements that I probably will ever need (I shoot mainly landscape), and doesn't cost me an arm and a leg (still a student here). I am actually planing on using the wood glue I bought from Home Depot on this piece of wood that is being rebellious. Taming it might possibly be fun! After all, these kind of things are parts of the fun!?
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