A friend has replaced his Minolta RD-3000 outfit with a new Canon D30 and a hand ful of L-series lenses and given me first dibs on buying it from him. To that en d, he's generously let me borrow it so I can play around with it for a while and see whether it fits my needs/budget or not.

Anyway, this afternoon, while reading the manual, I discovered that I could fire the shutter without a lens attached. Needlesss to say, it didn't take me long from there to come up with the idea of testing it on my Toyo 23G view camera as a possible proofing device. It took me about ten minutes to jury-rig it into pl ace and -- voila! -- it works perfectly.

Of course, there's the lens multiplication factor of 1.5 (relative to the 35mm f ormat) to consider as well as the additional multiplication factor due to using it on a 6x9 camera instead of a 35mm one, so it's perhaps not all that useful as a proofing device after all since it'd be necessary to swap lenses as well to k eep the composition the same.

Still, it works, despite this limitation, and quite well at that. My neighbor u p the street has a mill and a lathe in his garage and if he has some free time t his weekend, I may be able to put together a much better adapter than the duct-t ape and cardboard one I tossed together in ten minutes this afternoon.

I realize that by large-format standards, an 8Mb .TIF file isn't very useful but the price is right (assuming you already own a camera with interchangable lense s!) and for proofing and/or web work, it might be more than adequate. Stay tune d...