My Homemade Large Format Camera

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a DIY large format camera built from silky oak and teak and now it’s finished enough* to start taking pictures! I followed Jon Grepstad’s excellent plans for the most part so I won’t go into too much detail about the construction but my main change was to use a double rail for the front and rear standards to move on. I think this is a reasonably easy project for anyone with a bit of woodworking knowledge and I recommend giving it a go – the hardest part was tracking down spring steel for the part that holds in the film holder, I’m still not completely happy with that and will update this post if I find a source for the right stuff.

For those who haven’t used a large format camera, the front standard holds the lens and the back holds a ground glass for focusing. Focus is controlled by sliding the front or back standards along the rails. Each standard also has tilt, shift, rise and fall which allow fine control of perspective and focus in interesting ways – good introductory information about this here. Once focus and composition is right, you slide a film carrier in behind the ground glass and take the shot using the shutter and aperture controls built in to the lens, which is a Kodak Ektar 152mm/f4.5. There’s a couple more pictures below – over the next few days I’ll post my first test shots.

*note the masking tape holding the last bits together, this may not be permanent…