Converting an old speed to portrait orientation with the focal plane shutter?

[sully75]

I'm just getting to know this very old and beat speed I just got. One thing I knew that was going to be frustrating going in was the lack of movements in portrait orientation. I shoot mostly portraits...it's kind of an annoying problem. I got this camera so I could mess around with older lenses.

I'm obsessively trying to figure out how hard it would be to make a new rear standard for the speed to mount the focal plane shutter in portrait orientation. I think it's pretty doable, I think it would end up being a square box built up inside to mimic the inside (rectangular) dimensions of the original camera to give something for the shutter to mount on. And then building some spacers on the front to fit the rectangular front bed.

Doesn't seem all that hard but I'm wondering if anyone has done this already? The body on this camera is pretty beat anyway but the innards are decent so I wouldn't mind giving it a new skin.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Paul

[Bill_1856]

There are several of them around which have 3.25x4.25 revolving backs mounted on a 4x5 chassis.

[sully75]

For the record, I'm not talking about a revolving back, I would like to put the shutter into portrait orientation and use the movements that are usually only available for landscape.

[Tracy Storer]

Just modify the front standard to have the movements you want when the camera is mounted for verticals.

[Jim Galli]

That slit moves across a 4" plane and there's nothing else it's ever going to do. Now I have a fine old 5X7 speed that you could put a 4X5 back on and have your 5" portrait mode, but that seems a waste to me. You'll just have to work within the machines limitations I think. Kind of like buying a Model T Ford and then fussing that it won't travel at freeway speeds.

[sully75]

I get that. Maybe I'm not being clear. More or less want I want to do is mount the bed of the camera on the side of a new body built to accommodate it. I understand that the shutter is only 4x5, not 5x5. I just would like it to be in portrait orientation. I'd rather have the limited movements be in landscape orientation and get the maximum movements in portrait orientation.

The stumbling block is that the camera body isn't square, so it complicates making a new body to accomidate the shutter.

I'm pretty sure I can do what I'm thinking of, just was wondering if anyone has already tried it.

And your 5x7 speed is making me salivate. I'd shoot 5x7 in that, I wouldn't be worried what direction it was pointed!

[Jim Galli]

Old 5X7 B&J's are almost free. What would happen if you grafted the back of your speedy to the back of an old Burke and James. Ugly to be sure, but might be kind of novel. Just thinking weird thoughts out loud.

[John Kasaian]

Maybe trade it for a Crown?

[Robert Oliver]

I've been thinking about doing this... would be a fairly easy graft.


Old 5X7 B&J's are almost free. What would happen if you grafted the back of your speedy to the back of an old Burke and James. Ugly to be sure, but might be kind of novel. Just thinking weird thoughts out loud.

[Vaughn]

I have beat up 5x7 B&J you can have for shipping costs plus twenty bucks (no back). Have not tested the red bellows for pinholes and they smell slightly of cigs. I'll test them if anyone is interested.

Vaughn

[Paul Ewins]

I did something similar on a post war SG, although the shutter was broken so I removed it altogether. On that one I just rotated the bellows, but due to the way it mounts at the back it was major surgery. Sure, you could cut the back half off, rotate it 90 degrees and reattach it, but the end result will be more than a little unwieldy.

Another approach might be to mount an L bracket on the front standard to rotate that through 90 degrees.

Simplest would be as Tracy says, just modify the front standard to get the movements you want.

[sully75]

I have beat up 5x7 B&J you can have for shipping costs plus twenty bucks (no back). Have not tested the red bellows for pinholes and they smell slightly of cigs. I'll test them if anyone is interested.

Vaughn

PM Sent

[sully75]

Re: the crown, I want the focal plane shutter.

Well...I'm going to go into my secret basement workshop (which consists of a particularly crappy old formica dining room table) and see if I can make this work. Will have to borrow my friend's table saw. No harm done, if I can't make a body to fit, I'll leave it as is. I think I can do this though.

[jnantz]

can you make a pivot point on the front standard (where the lock down is ).

[sully75]

jnanian, not sure what you mean?

[Nathan Smith]

Old 5X7 B&J's are almost free. What would happen if you grafted the back of your speedy to the back of an old Burke and James. Ugly to be sure, but might be kind of novel. Just thinking weird thoughts out loud.


In this case, it really seems pointless to make a back out of the Graflex for the 5x7, when you're really only using it as a shutter. You could just as well get or adapt a 4x5 back for the 5x7 and use it in whichever position you like.

Somewhere or another I've seen Graflex camera's used both as front mounted shutters. That seems like a great idea for large cameras using old 2x3 or 3x4 Graflex bodies as behind-the-lens shutters for barrel lenses - like a DIY Thornton-Pickard, probably better.

Nathan

[sully75]

Nathan, we discussed the 2x4 shutter on a lensboard in another thread.

I'm pretty sure I can do this new body mod fairly easily. Mostly I want to keep the compactness of the speed as best I can.

Unfortunately the one table saw currently available to me might be a little rough for doing finger joints, but I'll see.

[Fotoguy20d]

What if you take the bed off your speed, rotate the front standard on the bellows by 90s (should be easy enough to build an adapter to allow the bellows to reattach), attach a piece of plywood (or whatever makes you happy) to the new "bottom" of your camera, and then attach the rails etc. You could also probably just re-attach the original bed to the "bottom" - might not close, though. Another consideration with this is that you'd probably have to give up the rear rails - might not be too big a deal with portrait length anyway. If you need some miscellaneous old graflex bits for this, let me know.

Dan

[jnantz]

if you look at the lock down for the front standard, see it
secures it to the rails when the lockdown released/locked ?
if you remove the front standard from the track, you could probably
pry off or modify the lockdown to free it up so it pivots when the it is
released, and secure when locked down.
it might work or it might just destroy your lockdown / front standard.

better yet ... you could save yourself a lot of trouble
by just modifying your lensboard to bend, tilt &C for you.
foam core, bristol board, mat board, cardboard &C
instead of a what you have ... later if you are that ambitious . metal or even claystone.
foam core is cheap, and you can have your lens off axis ... any way you want without modifying your camera ...

[sully75]

What if you take the bed off your speed, rotate the front standard on the bellows by 90s (should be easy enough to build an adapter to allow the bellows to reattach), attach a piece of plywood (or whatever makes you happy) to the new "bottom" of your camera, and then attach the rails etc. You could also probably just re-attach the original bed to the "bottom" - might not close, though. Another consideration with this is that you'd probably have to give up the rear rails - might not be too big a deal with portrait length anyway. If you need some miscellaneous old graflex bits for this, let me know.

Dan

Hi Dan,

I thought about that (if I'm getting you correctly). I think the problem (and maybe your describing it), is that the frame isn't rectangular, so mounted sideways, the front bed would be taller than the camera, and the walls of the frame will be too wide to attach to the bed extender things. So my idea is to make a new square frame, and kind of fudge each of those problems by building it up on the inside to make each area match the width of the stuff it needs to accommodate.

In my head it makes sense. I'd like the camera to look classy, too.

On another note though, if you had a baby speed back with crapped out or no bellows, I am thinking about doing the focal-plane-shutter-as-lensboard, maybe in a 5x7 or 8x10 camera.

Thanks for entertaining my delusions. I'm supposed to be studying for my nursing boards, which I'm taking on Friday. Not coincidentally I can only think about cameras at the moment. I had to have an intervention with myself about buying junk on ebay. Procrastination central!

[sully75]

if you look at the lock down for the front standard, see it
secures it to the rails when the lockdown released/locked ?
if you remove the front standard from the track, you could probably
pry off or modify the lockdown to free it up so it pivots when the it is
released, and secure when locked down.
it might work or it might just destroy your lockdown / front standard.


Actually I saw that in a View Camera magazine article. It's a good idea. I have it in my head that I want the front drop though.

[sully75]

ps you just gave me the idea to mock this up in foamcore. It'd help me to figure out if I can get everything to fit the way I'd need it to in a wood box. I'm not much good at drawing things out.

[jnantz]

Actually I saw that in a View Camera magazine article. It's a good idea. I have it in my head that I want the front drop though.


i guess great minds think alike :)
i haven't read or seen vc magazine in years ..

front drop .. can't help you there, unless you
and fiddle with your flexible lensboard and make it so it shifts
AND tilts , until you get what you want ...
kind of like a lensbabe-lensboord ... without paying through the nose..

(don't forget black masking tape, it will come in handy)

john

[Harold_4074]

Having read this thread through and gotten lost in all of the possibilities (without quite understanding what you were trying to accomplish) I went back and looked again at the original post.

If you are 1) mostly interested in portraits (i.e.--either strobes or less-than-full-sunshine continuous light, 2) desirous of playing with "older" lenses (with non-sync shutters or only in barrel), and 3) want some movements, then it seems that you should consider a cheap view camera that will take a Packard with an opening as large as the biggest lens that the Graphic lensboard will take (i.e.--not that big!).

About the only place that I can see where modifying the Graphic could be advantageous is where the larger view cameras cannot take very short lenses, because of the thickness of the standards and of the compressed bellows. I have a lovely 75mm f/2.5 that I can only use on my Speed Graphic for this reason, but then it doesn't cover 4x5. And without the use of the rangefinder, the Graphic is just a pretty awkward substitute for a view camera. The lensboard size will probably be limiting when it comes to portrait-length older lenses, so a Packard inside (for example) a Cambo (6x6 lensboard) might end up giving you as much or more capability as a modified Graphic.

Or am I still missing something basic here?

[sully75]

Hi Harold,

From my understanding of Packard Shutters, they are at a fixed shutter speed, like 1/60 or something? Not adjustable? That always seemed pretty lame to me.

The other thing is that it would be nice to have this all wrapped up in a field camera body.

I've been thinking about this obsessively for the last couple of days, it seems very doable to me. Basically build a new box, similar to the the size of the old one, but build out the sides of the front to meet the front standard (whatever you call it, the piece of sheet metal that the front standard rides on), and then figure out something to do at the top to accommodate the front standard (because it's taller than the camera will be). The winding mechanism ends up on top of the camera. Just disconnect the bellows from the camera and re-attach.

Seems pretty doable the more I think about it.

[Paul Ewins]

.... Just disconnect the bellows from the camera and re-attach.
....


Disconnect the bellows from the front standard and then reattach - easy. The only reason to disconnect from the back - which from memory is a fiddly job - is to avoid damage to them when cutting the body of the camera in half. You can't reorient them relative to the back because they are rectangular and made to suit the FP shutter aperture. You can only reorient them relative to the front, i.e. where they connect to the back of the standard.

Sorry if that is what you meant, but it sounded like you were planning to do it the other way.

Other than that it all sounds like a reasonable plan. I would think that the easiest way would be to saw it in half and rotate the back half through 90 degrees so the controls are on the top (as you said), then pack the bottom of the back half so that it is centred the same as the front half and attach the bottom of both halves to a single sheet of wood (or metal). Then pack out the sides of the front half until they are level with the sides of the back half and again attach a sheet of something to hold both halves together. At the top the back half will be lower than the front half, but all you will need to do is put a vertical strip inside to block out the light. Then give the whole ting a nice leather covering to hide the joins.

[Harold_4074]

Packards with the "instantaneous" feature are in the neighborhood of 1/25--1/60, depending on how hard you squeeze the bulb. For decades, this was considered acceptable, and to many it still is. It depends, of course on your lens, lighting, and style preferences.

I don't know if the lensboard issue will matter to you; if it doesn't, forge onward, and let us know how it turns out!

[sully75]

Paul that's more or less what I'm thinking about doing, except I think I'll just make a new box to put it all in.

Wait a tic...I think I might like your idea better. Or something similar. Will have to think about that for a while.

My nursing licensing exam is on Friday, this is really effective procrastination for me.

[sully75]

Paul the more I think about it I think you have the winning idea. I was thinking about just making the front the same size as the back, and making a kind of fudge all around to make everything meet up, but cutting it down the middle would really solve all those problems. The only issue to me is the saw kerf if I was to do that. I still might end up making it up from two boxes but your idea is awesome because I could still use the closing mechanism and wouldn't have to mess with the location of the hinges for the front standard.

Thanks!

[rjmeyer314]

The simple solution may be to get a 4x5 Super Graphic. The back will rotate between landscape and portrait orientations. However, no focal plane shutter, you need a lens with shutter. I've never noticed whether any of my Speed Graphics have backs that will rotate since I do almost all of my shooting in landscape mode. I know that most of my 4x5 Graflex SLR's have rotating backs.

[sully75]

rj the speeds don't have rotating backs and the super speeds don't have focal plane shutters. So if you want a focal plane shutter and a rotating back you are S outta L.

There was a company from England or Germany that made a rotating back focal plane shutter, someone had advertised one on here a couple of months ago but it was outta my price range. As are most things!

[rjmeyer314]

The simple solution may be to get a 4x5 Super Graphic. The back will rotate between landscape and portrait orientations. However, no focal plane shutter, you need a lens with shutter. I've never noticed whether any of my Speed Graphics have backs that will rotate since I do almost all of my shooting in landscape mode. I know that most of my 4x5 Graflex SLR's have rotating backs.

[venchka]

Crop your horizontal images to 4x3.2???????????????????????? Put a couple Chartpak tape lines on the ground glass to indicate the 3.2" width.

[jnantz]

Crop your horizontal images to 4x3.2???????????????????????? Put a couple Chartpak tape lines on the ground glass to indicate the 3.2" width.


and cut a pair of darkslides ..