Want to buy all the camera equipment you need to start a photography business for just $15.35? All you’ll need is… a time machine! Reddit user sneeden found this Sears Roebuck and Co. consumer guide for the fall of 1900. Two of the pages inside the catalog are for view camera kits that can help anyone “start in a pleasant and good paying business.”
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Earlier this week, we shared how photography student Mark Hilton has been hard at work constructing a 20×16-inch ultra-large-format camera by hand. If you found that impressive, get a load of photographer Tim Pearse’s handmade 20×24-inch view camera.
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For their Chicago-based rent-a-photobooth business Fotio, event planners Nick Harvey and Theresa McMullen created a custom camera rig that looks like a vintage view camera. The ingredients — besides the wooden shell and bellows — included a DSLR and an iMac.
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Digital view cameras can be quite pricey, but if you have an old analog view camera and a DSLR sitting around, you can combine the two cameras to make a DIY frankencam. Northlight Images has a tutorial for doing this with Canon DSLRs, and Nikon Rumors has a tutorial for Nikon shooters (either tutorial should work for you regardless of which brand you use). The resulting rig allows you to take advantage of the tilt and shift features of view cameras.

Director Jason Bognacki had a Contessa-Nettel Piccolette German folding camera from 1919 sitting around on his shelf for ages, and decided one day to bring it back to life by attaching it to his Canon 5D Mark II.
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Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
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