Okay there’s still some stuff to fix, and also I should maybe hold the camera steady sometimes (2nd pic) but my little 1890s street photography setup is getting somewhere.
These are all underexposed because I was a bit too pessimistic about how fast the shutter was today (with my modifications it fluctuates from somewhere between 1/200s and 1/400s, largely dependent on the current moon phase and general vibe of the day). But it works as a hand-held camera now. Kinda. If you take into consideration that it isn’t one at all.
The camera is set up as follows currently:
It has my very very simple viewfinder thingy (two mirrors in a 3D-printed housing), which now also holds a translation table from the random lucky numbers Goerz engraved into their lenses back in the late 1800s, to modern f-stops.
I also added the world’s least accurate focusing scale, which stops at 12 meters because that’s the longest sight line possible in my apartment.
And it has a sort of proper 3D-printed adapter to fit a Plaubel 6×9 rollfilm magazine to the back of the historic artifact (which is natively 9×12 – I’ll build another holder for sheet film at some point but this is easier for testing. Also cheaper.)
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