I purchased an old medium format lens with the intent to adapt it into a tilt-shift lens but then realized that a 180mm tilting and shifting lens was rather pointless so now I’m just trying to make it a lens I can focus and hand hold.

The first few steps I took were with the intent to adapt it as a tilting lens but I can still take the lessons I’ve learned and apply them to a focusing adapter. I began by making an accordion bellows using printer paper just to see if I was capable of folding one but it couldn’t take photos because of how thin the material was and how much light leaked in.

After this I made a second bellows out of poster board that actually blocked light so I was able to take a few test shots. I also tried making a more robust lens out of paper backed by gaffers tape but it didn't compress well enough to carry so I scrapped the idea.

Some of the photos I managed to take with this setup (in my defense it’s pretty hard to focus this hodgepodge of parts):

With the bellows adapter I’ve found that focusing to infinity requires the lens to be at least five inches away from my camera’s sensor so the final product is going to be pretty cumbersome. I don’t have any way of making a focusing helicoid like on a normal lens so my current plan is to use gears and a knob with a collapsing bellows for storage.