A friend has replaced his Minolta RD-3000 outfit with a new Canon D30 and a handful of L-series lenses and given me first dibs on buying it from him. To that end, he's generously let me borrow it so I can play around with it for a while and see whether it fits my needs/budget or not.

Anyway, this afternoon, while reading the manual, I discovered that I could fire the shutter without a lens attached. Needlesss to say, it didn't take me long from there to come up with the idea of testing it on my Toyo 23G view camera as a possible proofing device. It took me about ten minutes to jury-rig it into place and -- voila! -- it works perfectly.

Of course, there's the lens multiplication factor of 1.5 (relative to the 35mm format) to consider as well as the additional multiplication factor due to using it on a 6x9 camera instead of a 35mm one, so it's perhaps not all that useful as a proofing device after all since it'd be necessary to swap lenses as well to keep the composition the same.

Still, it works, despite this limitation, and quite well at that. My neighbor up the street has a mill and a lathe in his garage and if he has some free time this weekend, I may be able to put together a much better adapter than the duct-tape and cardboard one I tossed together in ten minutes this afternoon.

I realize that by large-format standards, an 8Mb .TIF file isn't very useful but the price is right (assuming you already own a camera with interchangable lenses!) and for proofing and/or web work, it might be more than adequate. Stay tuned...

-- Jeffrey Goggin (audidudi@mindspring.com), December 08, 2000