YouTube user destinw — the guy behind the chicken steadicam (and worth subscribing to) — recently met up with photographer Darren Samuelson and his massive homemade large format camera. In this video, we’re given another look into how this one-of-a-kind camera works, as Samuelson photographs the Saturn V rocket at the US Space and Rocket Center. Check out some of his amazing ultra-large format photos here.

Photographer Mitchell Feinberg wanted to continue shooting 8×10 large format once his Polaroid stockpile runs out, so he decided to create his own 8×10 digital back. He spent over a year looking for a manufacturer and designing the back, and shelled out enough money to buy a good-sized house:

The development and production of two backs (I wanted to have a spare) was equal to the cost of a good size house – before the housing crash. I know it sounds insane, but the financials on it are not so bad: I used to shoot on average 7.5 Polaroids per photo, and I shoot between 400 to 500 images a year. That’s at least 3000 Polaroids. At 15 bucks a pop. Or about 50K per year, minimum. Polaroid was at one point my highest single cost.

Now he’s the owner of the world’s largest color capture back (two of them, in fact), which shoots 10MP photos. He uses it to shoot test shots before using film for the final captures.

Mitchell Feinberg’s 8×10 Digital Capture Back [A Photo Editor]

Image credit: Photograph by Mitchell Feinberg and used with permission

This is the large format camera collection of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, one of the leading art schools in the United States. Beautiful.

(via Things Organized Neatly via Laughing Squid)

Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that’s about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that’s about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.
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Photographer Cary Norton built a working 4×5 large format camera using Lego bricks, a 127mm lens he purchased for $40 on eBay, and a film holder and ground glass in the back.
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Ann Arbor-based physician and photography-enthusiast Stephen Rosenblum was visiting the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture competition when he came across this giant large format camera that some giant snowman must have accidentally dropped earlier. The 12-foot tall camera was even hollowed out to look realistically like the inside of bellows from behind.

You can see the winners of the 2011 competition (and catch a glimpse of this camera) here.

(via The Online Photographer)

Image credit: Photograph by Stephen Rosenblum and used with permission

Solaroids are unique prints created by photographer Jeff Mclane by exposing large format (4×5 in) Fuji instant film to direct UV light for long periods of time.
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This foam core 8×10 camera was created by Daire Quinlan, the same guy that attached a 90 year old lens to his camera with homemade bellows.

The lens is an Industar 37 Russian large format 300mm designed for their FKD cameras. The shutter is a Sinar, takes standard 8×10 film holders.

Quinlan exposes onto photo paper instead of film, and focuses the camera by sliding the rear box forward and backward.
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Meet the 20×24 Polaroid Land Camera, a mythical beast in the world of large format photography. Polaroid’s founder Edwin Land created only seven of these 235-pound cameras over thirty years ago, and only six exist today. Two of them are on display at Harvard and MIT, and only four are in use commercially. According to Forbes, buying prints created with this beast cost $3,500 a piece, while renting the thing for a day costs $1,750 and $200 for each shot. Back in June, an Andy Warhol photo shot with the camera sold for a quarter of a million bucks.
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John Chiara is a San Francisco-based photographer that uses an uber-large format camera the size of a trailer that he constructed himself. The camera is so dang big that setting up the thing requires a car jack and lots of yanking. After setting up the film inside the camera, Chiara climbs out of the camera through a long black garbage-bag style tube. To develop the prints, he uses an 18-inch diameter sewage pipe that he pours chemicals into and rolls around on the ground.
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