Bellows Making Tips

Once you decide you would like to make a bellows you have some serious choices to make before you get started. Scouting around the internet I found it difficult to find good information on bellows making outside of Doug Bardell's website. Doug has a very good plan for making bellows and you would be doing yourself a big favor giving his method careful study. I did not use his method for making my 8x10 bellows, instead I choose a more traditional construction method. Take a look a James Vail's website for the type of construction that I used.

The hardest problem I had to solve was what to use as bellows material? I first considered making it out of leather but since I was making a bellows for an 8x10 camera with 30 inches of bellows draw that would require almost 2yards of leather. Leather is rather expensive in larger sizes so I dropped that idea. Studying various websites of home built cameras Porters darkroom blackout cloth was mentioned a couple of times. I choose this material as the inside of the bellows as only the inside layer must be light tight. One thing you must watch is the overall thickness of the bellows materials. Considering in a standard bellows you have an inside layer, stiffeners in the middle and outside layer the thickness adds up rather fast. Make your bellows too thick and sagging will be a problem. For the stiffeners in the middle of the two layers I cut up manila file folders. The outside layer is a Cordura Nylon which gives the bellows a texture look. Note that this stuff is not completely light tight. If I make another bellows it will be out of something a little bit lighter and thinner since this will combat the bellows from sagging. It will also allow the bellows to close down tighter so that shorter (wider) lenses can be used. Sagging bellows can be a problem when you do close ups and use extremely long lenses. Remember that a 300mm lens focus' at infinity at around 12" from the film plane to the center of your lens group. More bellows draw is needed for anything closer to the camera to around 24" for a 1:1 close up. 

The next decision you have to make is whether to make a straight or tapered bellows. A straight bellows is fairly easy to make and will do for a 4x5 camera, but using it for a 8x10 would make the front of the camera huge. Making a tapered bellows is a challenge at best but done right looks very good on a camera. One thing I found out is making a bellows takes attention to detail if you want it to look good. Also if you are short on patience you may want to buy a used bellows or have one made for you. A couple company's run ads in Shutterbug Magazine every month that will make a bellows to whatever size you want.

At this point you also have to decide how you are going to mount the bellows to the camera. On a monorail type of camera a bellows mounted on a frame that slips into the front and back allows for maximum versatility to change to a bag bellows for extreme wide angle lenses or to make a modular system. Field type of cameras that fold up are glued to the front and back in order to keep size to a minimum. For my 8x10 monorail I used the frame method since size was not a major concern. Also this makes it extremely easy to break down the camera or change parts on the camera.

Armed with all your research I would highly recommend that you go to a office supply store and purchase a roll of brown packaging paper. With this paper make yourself a small bellows and fold it and make sure it is what you are looking for since paper is a lot cheaper than destroying the real material. Make yourself a paper bellows the size you are going to need for your camera design. Measure the inside of the bellows and make sure it is big enough. For example on an 8x10 camera the inside of the bellows must measure right around 10 inches square if you have a rotating back to change from portrait to landscape. On my camera I am well over this figure in order to have maximum movements available limited only by the image circle of the lens.

Keep in mind bellows making is not something to be rushed, take your time and think about each step before proceeding on to the next. I can tell you from my experience that making a bellows is a lot of work, but is rewarding to know you made it yourself.

Good luck with yours!

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This site updated on August 29, 2005