In 2016 I designed, made the parts and built my first 4X5 film camera. This required me to delve into technical areas I was unfamiliar with, merging traditional woodworking practices with modern digital tools and software in order to complete a self-driven photography project. I drew the plans on paper and then had to learn how to convert those plans into a digital file so that I could then cut the aluminum parts on a CNC router. Learning how to draw my plans precisely so that I could generate a G-code, calibrate, and run a CNC routing machine were all techniques I learned by talking with people at different maker spaces in our area. The result was a fully articulating tilt, shift, rise and swing camera that I used on a project I titled The Downtownies. All of the photographs were taken on 4x5 film which I developed at home before scanning and turning them into digital files. The Downtownies is a collection of 26 portraits of various recognizable faces seen regularly in downtown Bryan. Each portrait was printed on 24X36 sheets of paper using dot-matrix printers and hung at the Village Cafe for display.

Preparing a 4X5 camera to take each individual image may take several seconds and even minutes. This is why many medium format portraits feature expressionless faces of subjects who are told to hold still and not move. I challenged the expressionless medium format portrait with these portraits in which each subject was encouraged to find their own unique expression and then coached so that sharp focus could be captured despite the time it took to prepare the camera.