1 Introduction

The nearest scattered cloud in Canes Venatici contains about fifty spiral and irregular galaxies with corrected radial velocities V₀ < 500 km/s. Before 1996 only four galaxies of this complex: IC 4182, DDO 154, DDO 168, and UGC 8508 had direct distance estimates via photometry of their brightest stars (Sandage & Tammann 1982; Carignan & Beaulieu 1989; Bresolin et al. 1993; Karachentsev et al. 1994). Georgiev et al. (1997), Makarova et al. (1997), Makarova et al. (1998), and Tikhonov & Karachentsev (1998) increased this number up to 38 objects. Among other unstudied members of the CVn cloud some galaxies belong to early types E-Sa, for which the brightest stars method cannot be applied for distance determination. The remaining galaxies of the complex are well resolved into stars. Here we consider five rather large galaxies: NGC 4144, NGC 4244, NGC 4395, NGC 4449, and UGC 8331, whose distances are not found in the literature. The first three of them are represented in the "Atlas of Galaxies Useful for Measuring the Cosmologic Distance Scale" (Sandage & Bedke 1988).