Do lenses fit in a folded Tachihara 4x5?

[Bill_1856]

I have a 4x5 Nagaoka, which is a great little camera, but even my smallest lens/shutter won't fit when it's all folded up. How about the Tachihara (or other similar wood field cameras)? TIA.

[Jon Shiu]

Hi, the tachihara can only fold up with a very small lens like the Angulon 90/6.8. I believe an older and lighter tachihara, which also was sold as Calumet wood field, had a hole in the bed to accomodate folding up with up to 150mm lens.

[Dennis Mairet]

A Wista DX can close with a small lens inside. Examples:

Old Fuji W 135mm f5.6 (single coated, in Seiko shutter) (modern one is larger)

Fuji A 180 f9

A Kodak 203mm Ektar should fit inside any folding camera.

One thing to try with a larger lens would be storing it in the camera facing backwards.

[tor kviljo]

A friend of my bought the Tachihara a few years back. At that time, the company had chosen to reinforced the tripod-plate assy. stealing some of the space left for lens-on camera when closed, so my friend could not even let the modest 180mm Nikkor M stay put when closing camera. I guess You should check things thouroughly for yourself before buying, if that is an important issue, as the tachihara-tripod change indicates that models may change in this aspect during production run.

[Roger Rouch]

Though I haven't tried it backwards, I can not carry any of my lenses on my Tachihara including the Ektar 203. It is new from about 3 years ago.

[Ernest Purdum]

The current Japanese field cameras are descended from earlier models, which in turn owe their ancestry to British designs going back very many years. Until the early 1970's, most of them still had a "turntable" in the bed, a large ring to which the tripod legs were attached. The opening in the center of the ring was large enough to accommodate most any lens which could be mounted on the rather small lensboard typical of the time. This, of course, left the lens unprotected, but nevertheless still attached to the camera.



Since the 1970's, turntables have disappeared. Even before that time, it had beome common practice to fit the camera with an adapter plate which closed off the hole, but permitted a modern tripod to be attached instead of the quite hazardous, though compact and light, separate legs. With the demise of the turntable, few lenses could be left in place when closing the camera.



There is an interesting possibility here. If the tuntable hole were filled not with a flat plate but a cup-shaped piece, carrying the tripod screw socket, a lens could be left attached and also protected. The camera thickness would be increased by the depth of the cup, but the weight would not necessarily increase at all. I have seen this done on one camera, but regret that I can't remember who was the maker.



There would be an additional benefit. A solid wood camera bed not infrequently develops splits, cracks or glue failure. The big aluminum plate found on Deardorffs is one way of guarding against this occurrence. The Deardorff's design ancestry, like the Japanese field cameras, goes back to English patterns, but the turntable was not included from the outset, about fifty years before the Japanese discarded it.