How to create a shutter

Falkenberg · Oct 18, 2007

My camera project seems to consist of problems to be solved. The Lens I have got is without a shutter. The Lens is mounted in a Sinar board. It has Aperture setting, but no shutter. Now I am thinking about how to make a shutter for my camera.

Has anybody created a shutter ? Maybe an electronic one.

Any input will be appreciated.

Best regards
Mikkel

TheFlyingCamera · Oct 18, 2007

If your lens is already in a Sinar board, look into acquiring a Sinar auto-aperture shutter. If that's not a viable option, a Packard shutter is just the trick. They show up used on ebay quite frequently, and are reasonably inexpensive. They're a case of "why reinvent the wheel". You'd end up making one yourself from scratch, after many hours of fumbling around and much wasted material, so why not just get one to start with?

Falkenberg · Oct 18, 2007

Why create a shutter

There are several reasons for why I want to create a shutter.
First: The camera is for a university project and I have to make as much my self as I can.
Second: I have access to a Sinar shutter/aperture controller, but it will not fit in my camera without me having to alter my design radically.
Third: It cant be that hard to make a shutter even an electronic one.

So any help will higly appreciated.

Pinholemaster · Oct 18, 2007

Well if you know electronics, you can make a shutter.

A lens cap can be a shutter if your exposures are long. Even a dark hat can work. How about a flap of opaque cloth or leather over the front of the lens.

A Packard shutter can be made from scratch. I'm sure there are plans on the internet if you search.

But I say, f/90 at 30 seconds, so your shutter is your hat!

JBrunner · Oct 18, 2007

A very simple mechanical (gravity operated) shutter design is a flat sheet in rails with a hole in it. A peg is put through it. When the peg is pulled, the sheet falls and the hole slides past the lens opening. The size (or length) of the hole determines the speed to some degree. A "bulb" setting is made by having a second peg situated so the sheet stops in the open position, that is then pulled to end the exposure.

Nathan Smith · Oct 18, 2007

Old box cameras had a very simple but useable shutter. You can pick one up cheap, study the design and make one similar but sized for your project. On the other hand, you may be able to find a 4x5 or "3A" (3 1/4 x 5 1/2) box camera with dimensions you can use directly -- and have fun with later

While you're at it, look for one with both "Instant" and "Bulb" (or "Time") settings - that will allow you to build yours with whatever speed you use most often, and allow timed shots. Should be pretty simple to set yours up to have a lever for the instantaneous shot and a cable release socket for the timed shots.

Nathan

Falkenberg · Oct 18, 2007

sliding paper as shutter

I like this idea. A sliding piece of paper as a shutter. Not exactly electronic, but very cool. Using gravity, it should not be to difficult to calculate the size of the opening in the paper. Would it be best o place the shutter at the lens end or at the film end.

Any input on foormulas for calculating the opening in the papers would be highly appreciated.

TheFlyingCamera · Oct 18, 2007

If you want to go for the guillotine type shutter, look and see if you can find the graflex shutter opening sizes for either a 4x5 or 5x7 sized shutter. I know the slit sizes on my 3x4 are 3/8", 3/4", 1 1/2" and I think maybe 1/8". Someone out there online must have the chart for the various spring tension plus curtain aperture speed combinations. I'd work from the settings of the #1 spring tension setting as a starting point. If memory serves, the #1 tension plus the 1 1/2" opening on my camera yield a 1/10th of a second speed. I don't remember the rest of the sequence, but it finishes up around 1/60th.

nicolai · Oct 18, 2007

You could scale a rotary shutter up to the size you need, and go cine-style and have a variable shutter opening. If you want to take one apart and see how they work, pick up a Holga. (I've thought of doing this for barrel lenses, too, as you can get multiple speeds out of a very simple mechanism with only one spring.)

Dan Fromm · Oct 18, 2007

Falkenberg said:
There are several reasons for why I want to create a shutter.

<snip>

Third: It cant be that hard to make a shutter even an electronic one.

So any help will higly appreciated.

Eh? If it can't be that hard, why have so few firms entered the business since 1930?

BTW, cine camera sector shutters just go round and round, they don't start and stop.

Struan Gray · Oct 18, 2007

Have you tried mounting the Sinar shutter backwards where the lensboard would go? That would allow you go get on with taking pictures.

Falkenberg · Oct 18, 2007

Taking the Sinar shutter apart

I was thinking about taking the Sinar shutter apart. I want to see if I somehow can use the shutter and discard the aperture thingy. If this is possible I could mount it inside/behind the lens. Since the camera will be easy to open it would not be hard to adjust the shutter speed. My design have to be finnished by nov. 1. since I have a date with the 3D printer and will have to make a more or less final print. I am thinking about making the design even more modular than I had started out with. This way I can add a small "spacer" behind the lensboard where I can make a gravity/cardboard shutter.

Struan Gray · Oct 18, 2007

The Sinar shutters have a reputation for being difficult to put back together again after disassembly. Unless your university really does not want it any more I would advise against taking it to bits.

How big is your lens, and what sort of angle of view is it intended to give? If it's not too big, and not too wide, it would be simple to build an extension box around the lens and mount the shutter on that. I have seen a couple of vintage Swedish cameras that did this - one had the finesse that the sides of the extension box were sliding louvres so you could access the aperture control on the lens.

Falkenberg · Oct 18, 2007

It is a Schneieder-Kreuznach Symmar-S 5.6/300. All the parts are mine and I can do with them as I want, but I want to keep the things in working order if possible. The camera I am building is a no movement 8x10" "point and shoot" portrait camera.

walter23 · Oct 18, 2007

Falkenberg said:
My camera project seems to consist of problems to be solved. The Lens I have got is without a shutter. The Lens is mounted in a Sinar board. It has Aperture setting, but no shutter. Now I am thinking about how to make a shutter for my camera.

Has anybody created a shutter ? Maybe an electronic one.

Any input will be appreciated.

Best regards
Mikkel

Google "packard shutter". Or you can use a black piece of paper. Simply put the paper over the lens, remove the darkslide from your film holder, then move the paper. I've done 1/4 second or so exposures reasonably well this way.

walter23 · Oct 18, 2007

Falkenberg said:
I like this idea. A sliding piece of paper as a shutter. Not exactly electronic, but very cool. Using gravity, it should not be to difficult to calculate the size of the opening in the paper. Would it be best o place the shutter at the lens end or at the film end.

Any input on foormulas for calculating the opening in the papers would be highly appreciated.

You could also look at the simple but somewhat elegant shutter design of the lowly Holga. It's a spring-loaded rotating wheel. When you push down the shutter lever, it pushes up on a spring connected to a tab on the wheel. The wheel has some kind of detent, but once the spring is compressed to a certain point the wheel is pushed out of the detent due to the force and it rotates quickly. The wheel has a hole in it, and the plate the wheel is mounted to also has a hole in it. When the wheel rotates, the two holes align briefly and an exposure is made. I think somehow the wheel rotates 360 degrees to get reset but I don't have it handy to see how it works. Obviously it can't just turn back past the hole or you'd get a double exposure. You could probably figure out how to get a bulb setting into this design.

There's a closeup picture of the shutter on this page in the part on pinhole modification (caption: "step 3"). It's flash embedded so I can't link the image directly. Maybe you can trace its function by carefully looking at this static picture; the safety-pin style spring is what gets compressed initially when you hit the shutter lever (right side of image in the closeup).

Wait, found the plain image:
Dead Link Removed

Comes from this page:

Dead Link Removed

nicolai · Oct 18, 2007

Dan Fromm said:
BTW, cine camera sector shutters just go round and round, they don't start and stop.

Yeah, but they do have adjustable angles, which when combined with a still camera rotary shutter that does stop could be cheap, easy, and versatile.

Struan Gray · Oct 18, 2007

Falkenberg said:
It is a Schneieder-Kreuznach Symmar-S 5.6/300. All the parts are mine and I can do with them as I want, but I want to keep the things in working order if possible. The camera I am building is a no movement 8x10" "point and shoot" portrait camera.

With a lens that big I think my trick of reversing the Sinar shutter isn't going to be ideal - the lens will lever the shutter downwards, unlike in the 'proper' Sinar arrangement where the lens and shutter are attached to different sides of the standard/format frame.

In any case, the Sinar shutter has a top speed of 1/60th, and that's also less then ideal with a 300 mm lens if you're going to hand-hold the camera. Even transferring the lens cells to a Copal 3 will only give you 1/125. A lot depends on what sort of photograph you want to take, but I would want something faster for a point and shoot. This rules out most homemade shutters too.

If you have the time, you might consider looking for a smaller lens which fits in a Copal 1, or which can be placed in front of or behind the cheap shutters from oscilloscope cameras.

Dan Fromm · Oct 18, 2007

nicolai said:
Yeah, but they do have adjustable angles, which when combined with a still camera rotary shutter that does stop could be cheap, easy, and versatile.

Depends on the cine camera. The vast majority of S8 cameras have fixed shutter angle.

The reason I brought up starting and stopping is that one of the problems of making a shutter for still cameras that works well is managing acceleration and deceleration. Many are the problems, weak are the materials, ... Cine cameras typically lose a frame on starting and another on stopping. A partial exception is the 8/8 Leicina, which stops the shutter by sticking a pawl into a slot in the main shaft. Bang! and its stopped.

nicolai · Oct 19, 2007

True, not all have them (though a lot of 16mm and AFAIK almost all 35mm do). While I wouldn't claim that Holga-style still rotary shutters are absolutely stable, they're surprisingly far into "not bad" territory. I had a Holga shutter tested, and while it certainly wasn't as accurate as an electromagnetic shutter, I was surprised by its consistency (I don't remember the exact tolerance as it was a few years ago, but it was around the same as a spring-driven curtain shutter).

For a crappy shutter, the Holga's isn't bad. The hole is at the end of disc travel, where it's more likely to be at maximum and consistent speed. If you had an adjustable hole, you probably wouldn't be able to simply say that half the size will yield exactly half the exposure time because of acceleration, as you mentioned. But you can build a shutter tester to interface with a computer sound card (or build one with an Arduino) very cheaply, and if the gap is continuously variable, it should be fairly trivial to figure out the correct spacings by trial and error.

3Dfan · Oct 19, 2007

There are a few old books that have info on shutters.

Photographic Cameras and Accessories
by Paul N Hasluck
http://lindsaybks.com/bks5/camera/index.html

Hasluck's Photographic Notes
http://lindsaybks.com/bks10/pnotes/index.html

pauliej · Oct 19, 2007

Dan Fromm said:
Eh? If it can't be that hard, why have so few firms entered the business since 1930?

Making and selling at a profit are two entirely different propositions. Life is hard, and business is even harder, re: Kodak, etal.

You may also check the homebuilt cameras and shutter stuff on the f195.org site, I am sure you can get a lot of good ideas there. Hope this helps you.

paulie

Falkenberg · Oct 20, 2007

I will look into all the different suggestions. Another friend of mine suggested that I make an electronic shutter with a piece of smart glass (http://www.glassonweb.com/articles/article/192/).
With my new camera design I will be able to change between the different shutters.

Nathan Smith · Oct 20, 2007

Falkenberg said:
I will look into all the different suggestions. Another friend of mine suggested that I make an electronic shutter with a piece of smart glass (http://www.glassonweb.com/articles/article/192/).
With my new camera design I will be able to change between the different shutters.

That's a very interesting idea - please let us know how your project turns out.

Nathan

nicolai · Oct 20, 2007

Last I looked into smart glass, the response time was still pretty slow (but that may have changed in the last year).

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