Birch

This block is, I guess (I am no carpenter), birch. Hard and dense. Found it in the workshop under the table.

I guess I make the "mover", wooden block from which the front and  rear boxes hang from, out of birch. It's perfect, finnish stuff, and as said, hard and dense.

The option is plywood; found also bigger plate of 40mm thick plywood (kinda thick?!) it's also very hard and feels pretty rigid. What we require from material, is that it should not be soft since it's in constant touch with the steel rails, the rails rubs it, and the block is always being tightened against the rails with bolt...

The block is made of 8 pieces but 7 could do, the small piece of plywood between two bigger blocks should be part of the lower block. So maybe I'll just gnaw 3-4mm groove, so it'll be like _|¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨|_ ... the point is, the grooves will force the block to be in right position

Hey, it's really hard to explain things like this in English.. I am no English speaker. Many things are easy to explain, but these PRACTICAL things here are way more complicated..

Making the rails

No, I'm not gonna paint it. If it get's rusty, it would be just great! Good color combo; rusty iron, black fabric, stained wood..

Since the school thing is over (I still don't get it - why so many dairy farmers wake up at 5 am; we wake up like most people, 8 am, and it feels pretty normal) I finally had my fingers on the project.

What I did today, wasn't hard and complicated at all.

That's the bar, and the simple quest for today (1.5 hours) was to refine it into piece of rails

Cut it in half

 Good, then you make holes

 Great job, now you can assembly it

 

 and a little reminder what we're up to:

yeah. Well, see you

ps Also: the bellows. Next week I'll be lucky owner of darkening sheet, what you call it. 1.55 x 3.0m piece. Also another same size piece of cheaper sheet. Haven't yet decided from what material I cut the strips from.

The L

It's all about random!

Currently I'm doing some feeding plans for ruminants at da agricultular university with Excel (I love excel)

I was thinking the project wouldn't proceed until next week, since I'm now stuck with practical studies at school away from home and workshop.

But it accidentally did; in hardware shop I randomly spotted a reck full of 200mm iron bars. There was perfect piece: L-bar, 30mm sides, length 200mm. Just perfect, will make 2 x 100mm rails out of it, 82mm from each other.

Barely fitted in my gf's old Vento. I'm scared it wont fit in my Alto.

We'll propably break the back window if it doesn't.

See you later

Thickness and leather

If I were a character in Morrowind, my fatigue would be -70. Today I've been quite active for 15  hours. Tomorrow will be a rest day - only 8 hours of action.

The plywood I'm going to use will be 9mm thick: should make the thing durable against time and action. Yesterday I came up with an idea that I would upholster the camera with dark, wine red leather. Idea of a red, leather camera sounded in the first place quite fascinating, but it would kinda mock all the large format cameras existed thought centuries (century?) so I'll just stain it

Economy and the method

The current project.

About the costs. Quite important part for all of us..

The fabrics will cost 50 euros. Plywood less than 10 (and there's way too much of it but it's the smallest m2 to be bought)  and the metal, well, scrap metal, 0 euros. Glue will cost 5-10 euros. I think knobs etc will take at maximum 30 euros?

So it's kinda cheap hobby to be building a camera, even a bigger camera.

Method

The photographing itself it's way more expensive.. my method is to expose straight to black'n white photographing paper which is taped to the casette in darkroom. Cool impression, since the paper is not photosensitive for red light, so red stuff will appear black.

Of course I'm doing everything in black'n white.. we'll see if some day I'll try another method (I'll bet on it). Wet plate perhaps? Would be great for these large format cameras.

Another thing I'd love to do, is to make casettes durable against water; construction material would be plastic etc. so I could build three boxes in which the casettes fit. The boxes would contain the chemistry for developing the pics. --> Tadaa, photos in the field.

Introduction of the project

Let's begin with identifying the projects. I have currently two.

The camera, which I call Ropkeit (for no reason!?), had a predecessor.

 This was the prototype.  In the pic above the blog you can see me and the camera; it was taken throught a mirror, so you see the camera. That's one of the first photos I took with the camera. There are dozens of more, but the project was frozen for a while and no photos were taken. The object, taken from old Minolta SRT-101, wasn't useful at all, due to it's focal length etc it was mostly suitable for macro photographing... I found later an old lense from disposed overhead projector (is that what it's called) and all the photos were taken with it. I'll probably use the same lense in the new camera.

Working with the bellows. I though it was a miracle when I built these and they actually worked, and I only made them once!!! Few problems: not so very pretty (corners, and not a perfect square!!). White fleece in the inside; not good (reflects light; should be black; might lower the quality of photos and mess exposuring). Too big frames in the front and in the back. The camera was supposed to be fitted for up to 30 x 30 cm negatives, but the bellows restricted it to something like 27 x 26 cm

Length is somewhere near 50-60 cm

The construction was all my own idea.. great sheet of black fabric (the one that let's 3% of light throught, not perhaps perfect, but very close indeed), then tens of strips of plastic, and then great sheet of white (mistake) fleece, and about 30 ml of glue.. kinda like a sandwich. And nerves, yes, also nerves were consumed.

The next camera's supposed to be bigger. Negative size up to 50 x 50 cm, FL perhaps closer to 100 cm (woaah, a mammoth camera). Should rule the world. I'm going to make the front box equal size with the rear box. Biggest difference will be the quality of handiwork. I'm gonna do it precisely according to my plans. I already planned the camera with a 3D-software. Model isn't  very complicated. The more simple the solutions are, the greater the change of succeed will be.

For some reason I want to do things at least SLIGHTLY different way, so the structure will be like, hmm, "hanging style".  Rail is up, and front and rear boxes are "hanging" from it. In the center there's the structure of the stand.

There's obviously no bellows in these pictures, and about the scale; this is 30 x 30 version, not the actual 50 x 50, which I mean to build.

Also one mistake; the legs of the stand
in the upper pic are too close to each other, bellows wouldn't possibly fit betweeen em.




The second project is about programming a software for dairy management, lol, so we'll leave that from the blog. The alpha version is already in use already and is great for heat management of the dairy.

Hello world!

A small Thing

Testing, testing



Well, seems to be working. Even the pictures

It's a wonder!

Blogger.com, a gigantic website, actually works

Even thought hundeds of thousands of people all around the world uses it daily and it's part of their very normal life

Oh man.

I have a finnish nickname, but in great haste, I had to come up with a new one, the international nickname, that can be used also in different cultures than my own so I made the obsrect-word.

Story of nickname is usually funny: mine is simple. The word bases on three words. Most important of them is "project", which creates the "rect" on the word (no references to "rectum"). Second, "abstract", which creates the structure, and third, "obscura", which is , well, a physical stuff and photographing is all about it. My actual nickname comes from finnish word "projekti" which means, surprisingly, "project".

My English might be a little startling, but I see you all understand it: I mean, I am only a finnish farmer.

Ps this blog is mostly about my projects. Most of my projects are about building large format cameras.

Let's see if this works out.