I’m not a device-obsessed person; I have never had GAS. Honestly, the seemingly endless discussions around cameras, lenses, and various accessories that grow every year, couldn’t have made me less excited. And now that I’ve said that, I’ll write about the device.
Camera
If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’re at least somewhat intrigued by the title and main image. You might even ask yourself, “what the hell?!” Fair question, and now I’ll tell you.
It’s a “straight camera,” built from three different types of camera systems: 35mm digital, large format, and medium format film. Specifically, it’s a Nikon D850 body (which serves as the digital back), a Cambo SCX monorail (a digital camera), and a Mamiya lens from their classic RZ67 system.
Yes, that’s ridiculous. Yes, I use it daily in my professional work.
As you can imagine, this thing isn’t exactly “turnkey” and I had to make a lot of modifications to get it to work. Going through all those revisions would fill a pamphlet, and I won’t write as much, so here’s a gallery of pictures with descriptions instead.
What is the problem here?!
Is this a solution to a problem? Why would anyone even do something like this? It’s all about the ability to do some kind of movement.
When photographing commercial products, you often face certain technical challenges that cannot be satisfactorily resolved with a conventional direct-mount camera/lens setup. Lines need to be kept straight, everything needs to be completely centered, front to back and a bunch of other things. A digital camera is what solves all those problems. The standard front tilt and pan allows me to control the focal plane, which would otherwise be limited to just being perpendicular to the sensor plane.
The standard rear tilt and pan changes perspective in the same way that just tilting or panning a regular camera. Then the rise and fall of the standards allowed me to change my mind without creating converging/diverging lines. This is most commonly used in architectural photography, but is also common in product photography. Shifting the standards left or right is similar to up/down and is useful when you want to move your camera out of sight of a reflective surface. Have you ever wondered how mirrors are photographed without cameras in them? That’s the change!
But, surely there is a commercial system out there that does the same thing, right? Yes, yes! Cambo does the extraordinary Actus XL 35and if I had the money I would probably use it, but my setup does the same thing for about 1/10th the cost. And that’s just good business. Perhaps more importantly, though, I love tinkering and I’m pleased to be able to say I built my system, rather than just buying it. And, as a bonus, more and more people are starting to take an interest in this type of system. I won’t go as far as to say there is a community, but with people like Scott Choucino in the game, probably not for long!
What about the results? Well, I’ll let another image library do the heavy lifting.
In the examples above, the first image uses a standard frontal tilt. The focal plane follows the rosette stalk. Now, at the distance and aperture I’m working with, the DoF is still shallow enough that focus is still needed. However, using tilt in this case I can use less images for my stack, which is important because the rose is definitely moving and will cause problems if I cannot quickly traverse the stack.
In the second image, no tilt is used and you can see that the stem and rosette have much less areas in focus. It would take more images to cross a stack in this case and movement in the rosette would be an issue.
The third image shows the resulting aggregation stack. I didn’t get the front edge of the highest commission in the stack, but you get it.
Conclusion
Anyway, that’s my camera! Is it for everyone? Certainly not. But it does what I need it to do. Like I said before, I use it daily and it paid more for itself. It’s even portable and recently made the trip to Atlanta for some client work. Heck, I might even make another one!
