The second week of MIT’s Independent Activities Period came around and I visited the MIT Hobby Shop for the first time with a plan, determination, and a hell of a lot of inexperience.

I wasn’t exactly a mechanical engineer. Moving blades frightened me. And I had no idea where to begin. Luckily Ken Stone, the director of the Hobby Shop, did, and with each new task he taught me how to use another tool.

By the end of IAP I finished my camera’s body:

The camera is made out of cherry wood and brass. To my luck, the Hobby Shop had some cherry shelves that they wanted to recycle for an amazing price. I quickly bought a decent stock, and set to work planing the wood to the correct thickness. When I had finished, I cut one of the pieces up into the appropriate dimensions for the camera body (as I sketched out in my plan. Ken then showed me how to make the (annoyingly difficult) comb/finger joints and the slot for the inside frame (hooray for routers and dado sets).

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Around the end of my second fall semester, I found myself obsessing over the quality of my negatives. As I started experimenting with the Student Art Association’s Speed Graphic, the addiction to large format quickly set in. However, I was hesitant to purchase a large format camera of my own—the ones I fancied were especially expensive and I was on a student budget.

In November I had the brilliant idea of building my own view camera. I wouldn’t start at 4×5. No, I’d start with an 8×10. And forget a monorail. I wanted a beautifully portable (and complex) field camera.

As soon as the idea set in, it infected my thoughts throughout the semester. I was itching to get started on the design, but I waited—if I started before finals week, I would never get my work done.

At the end finals week, I started creating a theoretical design in SketchUp. I read up on the design in several places: Rayment Kirby, The View Camera Construction FAQ, The View Camera Zone, and a few forums. No one had a design for an 8×10 field camera, although Rayment Kirby offered a great description of a 4×5 camera. I spent the last part of December and the first week of January processing the information and creating a design which looked like it should work, and I probably made it more complex than it needed to be with several movements.

In the meantime, I spent my two weeks at home working on a bellows design. My mom brought me to a fabric store where I bought some blackout cloth, faux leather, and black poplin. I spent a week and a half trying to find the proper angles for the ends of the ribs (made out of file folders), and the end of my stay putting it all together (right down to the hour before my flight back to MIT).

The evidence of my labor:

The bellows for an 8×10 camera are quite large. I didn’t quite realize the scope of the whole project until I laid out the stencils. (I’m ~5′6″)

I turned my room into my main workshop when the garage got a bit too cold. Early on, I thought the floor might be a great place to work, but my cat evidently thought otherwise, so I put a big piece of plywood on top of my desk and dresser.

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