Like a few people on the forum here, I have wondered what it would be like to have a digital back for my DSLR. Also, like most people, it is way out of my budget. I have seen a few threads where people bought adapters for their DSLRs and wondered how that might work. Having a little freetime, a brainstorm, and a buddy who is good with tools and I put one together.

The nutshell result-it kinda works. So I thought I might post it here in case anyone is interested.



The longer story.....

I have an Arca-Swiss Discovery with the 171mm lens boards. The Arca-Swiss system is highly modular and adaptable. My thought was to just pop off the ground glass, put on a flat lensboard and mount the camera to it. The adaptable nature of Arca means taking off the ground glass and putting on a flat lens board takes less than 5 seconds.

My thought was if I could mount the camera on the board, I could use the camera to shift and stitch images.

I had an old flat lensboard with a #1 hole. I purchased a cheap eBay extension tube set (approx $15) and had a buddy epoxy it to the board. He also took out the #1 sized hole just a little more too.




Since the extension tube set was modular I added just enough of them so that the prism would clear the board.