The Cambo Actus is a compact bellows system that you can hang a number of different cameras from. I have seen a lot of really nice photo equipment over the years, and the Cambo Actus is right up there with the best of it. This is one sweet little system. I have both Nikon and Sony A mounts, and I helped talk Pentax into making me the first Pentax K1 mount, which I am told is in the making.
What I really wanted to know is if I could take this system out into the meadows, woods, and fields. The more I use tilt and shift, the more I like it, and as a focus stacker, using tilt saves me an enormous number of layers, if I pull some of what I want to photograph into the same plane.
So very early this morning, with the Nikon D810 mounted on the Actus (with the El Nikkor 105mm APO lens), I headed into the meadows. Of course I forget my tall boots, which meant I got soaked to the skin crawling around out there, but had a great time.
Basically, what I was doing, as mentioned, was to use vertical (sometimes horizontal) tilt to bend subjects at different distances into more or less the same plane. Then I took either a single shot or perhaps several layers of shots to capture what I wanted to... and stacked them.
The long and the short of it is that the Cambo Actus worked like a charm. I believe I already mentioned that this little beast is already enshrined in the hall of my mind as superior equipment. It is that nice.
Here are a few shots from the outing, nothing special, but it should give you an idea of why I like the Actus. Is it heavier than just a camera and lens? Yep. Was it a creative experience. You bet!
I have used the Nikon PB-4 and PB-6 bellows, the Novoflex CASTBAL, the Novoflex BALPRO, and the Rollei X-ACT 2 bellows systems, but this is by far the most fun I’ve had.
