I hope it's ok posting this question here - it's a bit of woodworking and a bit cabinet making!
Please see this image;
formatting link
's not the best, but hopefully it's enough. I'm thinking of making something like this, and one thing that I can't quite work out is how the hinges work.
If you look closely, you'll see the doors aren't perpendicular to the base, but rather are on a slight angle.
Won't the doors swing out funnily? With part of the door ending up beneath the level of the base?
Strap hinges on an opposite angle equal to or greater than the current angle of the frame. If you want to get exotic and have them open properly, then pocket doors would make them look good and function properly.
> It's not the best, but hopefully it's enough. I'm thinking of making
Yup. So? The doors are well off the floor, plenty of clearance. If you build quirky stuff it's going to do quirky things. Maybe put chains on the doors to keep them from swinging all the way out, or hinges that stop at 95-100 degrees.
>>> It's not the best, but hopefully it's enough. I'm thinking of making
...bingo, give the man a ceeeeegar. I'm getting into architectural photography and one of the *big* deals is converging lines...how to
*not* get converging lines is a tough...and expensive...nut (I believe Robotoy found one of the same doors that got close, but you'll notice it still isn't quite correct). If you want to swing doors off of jambs that are not plumb with doors shaped to match, and french no less, well, buckle up. Best idea I've seen is to "pocket" them and even that would be funky, imagine the jamb sides when the doors are in the open position. Now, a paralellogram-shaped opening...heh...
All you need is a view camera with tilting/sliding/rising/falling front and back. Biggest problem IMO is that when you correct for converging lines you get a "flat iron" appearance. My preferance was/is partial correction - after all, lines *do* appear to converge when we look at them - to avoid camera induced accentuation of same.
As far as expense goes, you can easily find a decent used camera such as Cambo/Calumet, Omega etc. *with* lens for around $500. Toyo too but probably a bit more. One does not *have* to have a Sinar :)
A set of rubber tanks, some 4x5 hangers, a big enlarger... *drools*. I loved that hobby.
The 'correction' of the cabinet posted by the OP I did in Photoshop. Very sloppily done on the fly with the 'distort transform*
And you are correct. It looks way nicer to do a partial correction. Btw, Nikon and leica and i believe Contax all made (or still make) a lens or two with mechanical correction capability. I think the Nikon had a focal length of 35 mm. I have also seen mini bellows used on a Contax RTS.
...I've gotten a decent wide angle that will do for now...doubt if I'll ever go the bellows route, there's some nice software to help correct, too. You guys sound like you know the biz...I tend to spend money when I think it'll solve a problem, not at the expense of knowledge vis-a-vis the goal, but to achieve maximum speed...and maximum may be minimum in many circumstances...
>>>>> It's not the best, but hopefully it's enough. I'm thinking of making
FWIW, depending on your standards and intended market, it doesn't have to be all that expensive. Any decent photo editor can correct that sort of distortion, at the sacrifice of some pixels and a bit of genloss.
Another option is to use an extreme wide angle held level and then crop out the bottom half of the picture--that if you maintain original aspect ratio costs you 3/4 of your pixels though--that might be fine though for small prints.
The "right" but expensive way to do it is a lens with shifts.
FWIW, Nikon has three tilt/shift lenses in the current line, from 24-85mm, and Canon has four, from 17-90mm.
None of them are particularly cheap.
The Ukrainians are making a 35mm 2.8 tilt/shift that can be had fairly cheaply--there are two up on ebay right now for under 300 bucks, one in Canon and the other in Nikon mount--search "Arsat shift" and include descriptions and you'll find them and a lot of others. Not the greatest lens ever made but decent enough, and the build quality is Soviet military or better (the factory was producing them for the Soviet government before the Fall, and from all accounts they've been improving the quality ever since), which means it looks rough but everything works and it will take a beating.
With any of these you want an eyepiece magnifier--the ones that Dealextreme sells are usable and cheap (main problem is that they aren't parfocal--when you change from low to high power you have to readjust them), the ones from the camera manufacturers are generally better but not necessarily enough so to justify the cost differential. The reason you want the magnifier is that none of the tilt/shift lenses are autofocus, with the lens off-axis any focusing aids in the viewfinder are iffy, and just forget about the focus confirmation getting you close enough.
If you keep the film plane of the camera parallel to your subject you'll have fewer problems with distortion. That's all view cameras do...let you keep the film plane parallel.
In that case, did you open the doors and see how they hinged?
Funky stuff like that is popular with scifi shows. One thing I commonly see is that the doors pivot on a vertical axis that is inset from the "hinge" side of the door. So the bulk of the door comes out while a narrow strip along the side goes into the cabinet.
No clue how you build that. I'm still trying to figure out why the garage hasn't built anything with all of the tools that I bought and put out there. (Spring, and fewer excuses, will soon be here.)
...yessir, that's understood...pitch,yaw and roll come to mind...tilt/shift (TS) lenses are what I was referring to when mentioning expense. Changing the plane of focus...
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.