Build Your Own View Camera!: An Easy and Inexpensive Passport to the Professional World of Photography for the Hobbyist (A George Kase book) [Paperback]

Bert West (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Dogstar Pub; 1st edition (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1886757070
• ISBN-13: 978-1886757073
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,956,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Written well, published poorly, October 4, 2000

By 

Just a guy - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Build Your Own View Camera!: An Easy and Inexpensive Passport to the Professional World of Photography for the Hobbyist (A George Kase book) (Paperback)

It is clear that Bert West has spent years finding a way anyone can build a good quality view camera from inexpensive and relatively easy to obtain parts. The book is written well. The whole project of building your own view camera is separated to smaller, easy to manage, subprojects which do not require any specialized skills. I only miss one piece of information: While he explains how to make a bellows, he does not tell me how to attach the bellows to the front and rear standards. Still, I rate the contents of the book at 5 stars.

Too bad, though, the book was published by an amateur publisher. Any and all criticism you may have heard about the horrors of desktop publishing applies to this book. The typesetting makes the text confusing and detracts from the reading. It is hard to tell where the main text ends and the text of an illustration begins. The book is full of typos. It uses "it's" for "its". It combines two words into one in many places. Worst of all, the quality of the photographs makes certain sections of the book worthless. Particularly the pictures that are supposed to show how to fold the bellows are just one big blob of dark gray.

Strangely enough, the book starts with a disclaimer of publisher's liabilities. Apparently it is not the first book Dogstar has butchered.

I still recommend this book to anyone who wants to build his own view camera. After all, it is the only book currently available on this topic. Just expect some serious frustration, compliments of the publisher.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This book stinks to high heaven!, April 30, 2001

By 

H. Karoly - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Build Your Own View Camera!: An Easy and Inexpensive Passport to the Professional World of Photography for the Hobbyist (A George Kase book) (Paperback)

I recently purchased this book from Amazon.com and it is full of bad illustrations and is poorly written. I guess when all is said and done you'll have a working view camera but if you don't have the tools to start with you might as well find a used camera somewhere and save yourself a lot of time and money. If you want a camera that is pleasing to the eye then this is not the one for you either. Check out Jon Grepstad. He's a Swede who has written a book similar to this one and his camera's are pleasing to look at and use. http://home.online.no/~gjon/

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An environmental waste of paper, August 22, 2001

By 

James Ewins (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Build Your Own View Camera!: An Easy and Inexpensive Passport to the Professional World of Photography for the Hobbyist (A George Kase book) (Paperback)

I read the other reviews and thought it couldn't be that bad, but it is. A reasonably clever person with some engineering background could and should design a more functional and attractive view camera than that shown. For that reason the waste of time was worse than the waste of money.