Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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/

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.

The only book on the subject that I could find.The photos in the book are horribly grainy.The info is sketchy in some spots.Having said that,I don't think I would have started buiding my own camera had it not been for the inspiration provided within its covers.The author's breezy self-depreciating style makes you really believe that almost anyone with determination could build a workable camera even if they are only moderately skilled.

Build Your Own View Camera! is an informative book on a subject that has had little information available. Even though I only gave it two stars, I still recommend this book if you are serious about building your own camera. The book is lacking good detailed photographs- they bleed to black. Also the writing style is poor. The redeeming value of the book is that it is the only one available on the subject. So if you want to build a view camera you will save yourself some headaches if you buy the book.

Pros: This book does show you how to build a functional view camera with inexpensive materials.
Cons: The pictures (or the black blobs that pass for them) are the worst I've ever seen on any kind of published material. They look like Rorschach inkblot tests.

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....END

I agree with others on here,, this is not well produced,,, photo's are black blobs, and lacking information thats needed..

The previous reviews haven't exaggerated the faults of this book. No self respecting photographer would allow their work to be halftoned so coarsely as the photo illustrations in this book are. But they do their job well enough, and the line drawings are effective.

The overall tone of the book is relaxed and casual; the author goes to length to reassure unskilled woodworkers as the project progresses. It's too bad the book's editors (if there in fact were any) took that approach to publishing it, but the book does provide clever ideas and some confidence in building a view camera. More than a decade later, there are abundant resources on the web to give a more complete plan for a homemade camera.

Because this book leaves critical steps obscured or omitted altogether (like how to attach the bellows to the standards), it won't suffice as a complete manual. But it's a good place to start, because unlike most current web resources it communicates that it's really quite easy.