Folding bed camera

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A folding bed camera is a folding camera with a lensboard which is mounted on a slide that is movable along rails on a plate. That way the camera's bellows can be expanded to its operating length. Usually this plate is the door which shuts the folded camera. Thus these doors are openable exactly 90 degrees. After opening the door the slide with the lensboard can be pulled along the rails onto the camera door, the "folding bed", to unfold the bellows. Usually the slide is ajustable for different bellows lengths, often with help of a focusing scale so that ground glass focusing is not necessary for snapshots. Therefore the cameras usually have a small waist level viewfinder mounted on the folding bed or on the lens board. When folded and closed the whole camera is securely enclosed in its own body, including the finder. Many sophisticated folding bed cameras have a mechanism to elongate the rails to enable use of alternate lenses or the long focus setting of combinable lenses, of course necessarily with groundglass focusing since the focusing scale is out of reach of the lens board holder's distance indicator pin. Most common lens board move option the the vertical shift. Many folding bed cameras also offer horizontal shift, some also lens board tilt, lensboard swing and/or camera back tilt by folding bed tilt.

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