Camera Arrived!
So the Ebony has arrived. It came in a very nice silver embossed cardboard box and had no manual. So the first thing I did was to extend the bed using the right hand side geared wheels. Very smooth action but then got stuck. I discovered that this is because on the left hand side, the locking nuts were rotating with the geared axle, causing the geared motion to lock the bed too. When I loosened these off all was fine. The next step was to try it with lens on. I put the Symmar S 210 on and put the whole beast on the dining room table and looked into the ground glass. WOW.. The image looks very 3D. In fact it looks so 3D I had to close one eye to find out why. The answer is that it is 3D, each eye sees a slightly different image and there is a definite sense of depth in the picture. This could be disconcerting when composing as it creates form in the image that won’t be shown in the final picture. OK, so I’ll be closing one eye to check final composition :-). The Schneider 4x loupe also arrived and it was a lot bigger than I expected. the front opening is about an inch across. Saying that, the picture shown is perfect for focus. The ground glass grain is only just visible and I can see more focus detail than I can probably focus accurately with the geared knobs. I showed the whole thing to Charlotte and she said “Why is it upside down?”, but apart from this philistine comment she was appropriately impressed. I also tried so rear tilt in order to show Charlotte the focussing abilities (it seems she is being asked why is Tim going back to using a film camera, and a victorian “head in bag” one at that). Just a quick check to see if the camera will fit in my photo bag (Lowerpro Pro Trekker II) and it does, with a lens on to boot. Hopefully I’ll get the dark cloth and mount soon and I can take it out for a test run!
