Big Bertha

[sleeping]

Check this out: 1016mm F5.6!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmoseleyphotos/sets/72157627614102841/

There are actually a few of these out there, they were custom-built for various newspapers for shooting sports and such…

[lokisbong]

Holy shit! That thing is freakin huge! 60 pounds with the case? So what would the camera weigh? I’m betting close to 45. Pretty damn cool to see the old tech stuff. Thanks for sharing.

[orionid]

want.

/oblig.

[ennuipoet]

I will never complain about the weight of my camera’s again…

[Choc-Ful-A]

I was searching for a site that listed the weight of that insane Sigma f2.8 “green” zoom lens, which is ~35 pounds supposedly, and I found this fun page of zany lens trivia and thought you all might get a kick out of reading it. The first one is reported to weigh over 500 pounds! wtf?

[Curious]

thanks sleeping. what a great find. i’d like to know how the film was loaded. i’m thinking the standard one per side 4 x 5 film holders but in that case you really had to be quick to make the preset focus part pay off.

[sleeping]

There were various other things you could get to hold more film than the two-sided holders – the original one was a bag magazine that contained a stack of film holders, and you could slide one out into the bag and stick it in the back of the stack:

http://lommen9.home.xs4all.nl/holders/cut%20film%20magazines.html

Then there’s a grafmatic, which is a later, more automatic spring-loaded version of that:

http://graflex.org/speed-graphic/grafmatic/

There was also a similar system that used pre-loaded film packs (kind of like a polaroid except it didn’t eject the used film), but I can’t find a detailed page for that one, they stopped making the packs for it in the 80s apparently…

[sleeping]

found a couple shots of people using them!

http://graflex.coffsbiz.com/bigb05.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/the-irresistible-sisto/ (scroll down)

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