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I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]
- i2pi 3y agoI was challenged to make a lens for a friend without buying any new optical elements. I have a pile of glass that I've salvaged from old camera lenses that I've modified. I wanted to make a cooke triplet but didn't have any negative elements on hand where I precisely knew their characteristics. I then realized that my eye glasses are relatively well characterized negative lenses, so I had an optometrist cut them into a disc shape and I built the lens around that. It performed very well in my simulations, but not so well in real life. But it was a fun project and my friend ended up with a unique lens for her camera.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoAmazing project, dreamy images. "Fingerprint coated" haha !
- Zobat 3y agoThe "fingerprint coated" cracked me up as well and that text was already seriously funny. "...this lens fails to deliver persuasive arguments in nearly all situations..." LOL
- Rygian 3y agoYou weren't wearing your glasses in real life. That might explain the (apparent) bad performance of the lens compared to simulations? /jk
- hef19898 3y agoMy dad is giving photography lessons, and one of the constants are people realizing during session one that they, in fact, do need glasses when the autofocus does not agree with their eyes. When I borrow my dads camera for the odd shot at times, I totally relly on AF, if I went by the view finder I am almost blind... Same thing the other way round!
- kuschku 3y agoThat's the advantage of an electronic viewfinder :)
- fallinditch 3y agoSounds like you need to adjust the viewfinder diopter.
- hef19898 3y agoYeah, we did! Using the other person's viewfinder on the other hand... Well, I trust AF in those cases!
- llm_trw 3y agoI swear the only thing that the Bolte Bridge attracts more of than seagulls is photographers. Also the desktop I have now for ML work is powerful enough to do a full 3d simulation of a lens using the full Maxwell equations from first principles. I remember doing the back of the envelope calculations that I'd need the Bluegene/L back in my undergrad days to do it for real, well: https://bnnbreaking.com/arts/video-gaming/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-outperforms-ibms-bluegene-l-a-leap-in-computing-power/ https://bnnbreaking.com/arts/video-gaming/nvidia-geforce-rtx... What a time to be alive.
- hef19898 3y agoWhy would you use ML to develop well understood formulas from first principle, if you can also have a properly developed program for the same purpose?
- jstanley 3y agoI think the ML that the desktop is for, and the optical calculations, are 2 unrelated projects.
- hef19898 3y agoWhich would actually make a lot of sense, now that I think about it...
- llm_trw 3y agoYes, OP was doing linear ray tracing to see how the lens would perform on the video. I remember doing the same in a computational physics class way back in the day and talking to the lecturer about what you'd need to simulate real optics without approximations in the equations. The answer was the worlds fastest super computer at the time. I was a bit shocked that he claimed that was the state of the art for lens manufacture in industry too - no idea how true that was. But figured that if you needed that much computation it made sense. Well I have 2x that under my desk now and I use it to do local development before I push to cloud machines with 100x the power where the actual work happens.
- metadat 3y agoAre you able to share any demonstration pics using your custom lens? Certainly a creative fun project.
- atoav 3y agoAll it takes these days is a piece of aluminum foil and a needle. Tape the foil in front of your sensor (without light leaks), poke a small hole into the center of the resulting spot with the needle. Takes high ISO settings to get something out of that, but it works and is dead simple.
- i2pi 3y agoGiven that this is HN, I should add that I used the wonderful ray-optics Python package for doing the optical design: https://ray-optics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://ray-optics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- ddalex 3y ago"...If you're a fan of vintage photography, with all its charming imperfections, the SUPERCHROMAT lens might be your jam. Embrace the softness, the chromatic aberration, the unpredictable vignetting. This lens isn't about precision; it's about character. And at a price only the absurdly wealthy could afford, it'll definitely make a statement. " The so bad it's actually good :) Lovely song, too
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 3y agoThing is so, good vintage lenses, and I mean lenses from the 70s, are actually incredibly sharp, and perform great optically. To this very day, if you get a good sample. Improvements are mainly in terms of coating (reflections, ghosts and such) as well as zoom ranges and auto focus systems. That vintage lenses are not sharp is simply not true, having a lot less of glass in a lense is actually an advantage. If you talk about lab test numbers, especially around the corners of the frame, modern lenses sure beat vintage ones. Not that you would realize any of that in real life (art replication, detailed macro work and other specialized stuff nonwithstanding).
- kuschku 3y agoIf you'd like to e.g. crop a vertical frame out of a horizontally framed picture, the sharpness limitations of old lenses also become immediately obvious. Even many newer lenses immediately fail.
- hef19898 3y agoReally? Never had the problem, and I print up to A3, even have a A1 sized print from a D70 and a old 18-85 (?) kit Nikkor, which is sharp enough, with enough resolution, at the edges and corners. If you take a 100% crop from a corner so, well, that is different. I'd argue so, that in this case, you should have composed your shot differently in the field. And again, you have to print huge to actually see the difference.
- Retr0id 3y agoWhat's the name of the song? Edit: CARIBOU - Hello Hammerheads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N_VvfPX1Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N_VvfPX1Bc
- dukeofdoom 3y agoDon't forget to make it radioactive!
- mauvehaus 3y agoThis is a thing in vintage lenses: https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Radioactive_lenses https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Radioactive_lenses I own a Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 50mm f/1.4 and can confirm that the glass browns with age. UV exposure (sunlight) does clear it some.
- dheera 3y agoYep, I have a couple thoriated lenses, it sucks that people downvote an actually relevant comment without understanding.
- zabzonk 3y agoi remember making my own camera in the mid 1970s. the lens was one of those crappy macro things you could screw onto a proper slr lens, and the film was actually photographic printing paper. the body was cardboard and tape, and the shutter a bit of cloth. after you had taken a pic, you had to rush into the darkroom, develop the paper and then reverse print it (cannot remember how, or even if i did). all a bit weird, but it kept me amused back then. i haven't been involved in photography for nearly 40 years.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoMuch has been lost (of course far more has been gained - such as my kids using worthless hand-me-down Android tablets as cameras quite creatively) since photography went digital. And combining both photography paper-as-film and eyeglass lens optics and ... what do you mean, darkroom? https://www.timhunkin.com/a198_goodbye-cibachrome.htm https://www.timhunkin.com/a198_goodbye-cibachrome.htm Sadly, this marvellous paper - direct positive colour and easy to develop - is no more. Direct link to the video since (for me, right now) the embed in the above doesn't work. https://youtu.be/5AOlPuTQt-M?si=q7RibENicPH0Be9m https://youtu.be/5AOlPuTQt-M?si=q7RibENicPH0Be9m
- zabzonk 3y agoi don't think i've ever known anything as magical as developing my first wet-photography print.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoIt was magical, wasn't it? A couple of film photo adventures on my old cobwebsite... https://wandel.ca/homepage/yashicamat.html https://wandel.ca/homepage/yashicamat.html https://wandel.ca/homepage/wetcamera.html https://wandel.ca/homepage/wetcamera.html TLDR: The first one is about using a 20-year-past-expiry film in a format I didn't otherwise use; the second is about developing a drenched E6 slide film in b&w chemistry and trying to get prints.
- dekhn 3y ago
- Solvency 3y agoI totally love this from a DIY creative perspective. You could probably sell this to Zack Snyder for $5m. Because that's basically what happened in his last 2 abominable movies. He found some really unsuitable thrift lenses and thought it was a master stroke of genius to use them in a professional movie. That's why virtually every single frame is horribly blurred except at the exact center.
- gen3 3y agoOnce you keep your eyes out for the look, the usage of vintage lenses in modern movies can be pretty apparent, for example a Helios 44-2 was used in "The Batman" for the car chase scene with the penguin. There must be a few floating around the Hollywood rental shops, the Helios has a pretty distinctive bokeh pattern. You'll see it shot wide open looking directly at the subject for dramatic affect Luckily these lenses are pretty cheap (The USSR made many of them), I purchased two in late 2022 that shipped from Ukraine A video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYvWpavSXeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYvWpavSXeE
- CPLX 3y agoIf you want to get this effect quickly without spending any money at all, and you have a pro-type camera with a removable lens, you can get it by just holding the lens against the opening, and rocking it side to side a little. It's a pretty common trick photographers and videographers use to get a sort of dream-sequence effect.
- munificent 3y agoIf you want to spend some money and have something a little more stable and usable (and less likely to get dust on your sensor), the Lensbaby Edge 80 and Sweet 80 lenses produce a similar effect and are tons of fun. I did learn that they must be used judiciously. After shooting most of a personal music video with a Sweet 80 wide open, my wife described it as "like watching an ocular migraine".
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoLovely feedback from your wife! I don't know anything about photography. Is using specialized lenses like the ones you mentioned better than postprocessing software?
- munificent 3y ago"Better" is a highly subjective term. But lenses can do things that postprocessing can't do, strictly speaking (though it can often emulate well enough to fool most people). The input to a lens is a field of photons that are: 1. Striking the sensor at different places. In other words, which pixel they hit. 2. Coming into the sensor at different directions. 3. Coming in at different wavelengths. The 2D image captured by a sensor completely discards 2 and it drops a significant amount of information from 3 on the floor by bucketing all wavelengths into red, green, and blue amplitudes designed to mostly mimic human visual perception. Lenses have access to the whole shebang.
- nickcw 3y agoFrom the YouTube video description :-) ... With mere hours of experience in the art and science of optical design, the team at SUPERCHROMAT remain novices in the field. As such, this prime lens, with 6 elements over 4 groups, provides inferior optical performance at a price affordable to few. Regardless of whether it’s a matter of selective focus in the close-up range, high-contrast available light applications or landscape shots with immense depth of field, this lens fails to deliver persuasive arguments in nearly all situations unless stopped down to f/22. 2X 200mm biconvex lenses BK7. Uncoated. -700 / 075 X 3 used eyeglass lens 1.67 / Vd 42. Fingerprint coated +30mm aspheric achromatic triplet LAK14/SF57/Aspheric polymer. VIS 0º coated
- jollyllama 3y agoAt 02:29:50 you can see the shape of a skull form in the plants in the upper portion of the screen.
- dylan604 3y agoMaybe if you run ML on it, it will find Ryan Gosling?
- araes 3y agoFeel like I'm missing a meme ref. However, may have found an interesting rabbit hole anyways. Apparently a popular DeepFake choice. Aug, 2023 paper notably. YT, voice copying demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwuAjeDOVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwuAjeDOVE arXiv, voice cloning detection: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12734.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12734.pdf kaggle, Deep-Voice (support files): https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/birdy654/deep-voice-deepfake-voice-recognition/data https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/birdy654/deep-voice-deepfake... Has voice cloning using Retrieval-based Voice Conversion and then detection for: Ryan Gosling, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Margot Robbie, Linus Sebastian, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump. Apparently overly-optimistic detection results reported based on discussion, although they're still not bad at 86% after removing possible training data issues.
- dylan604 3y agoNo, there was some image processing that was trying to recognize shapes and kept finding Ryan Gosling in images. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650 So, maybe it wasn't "kept" but did it at least once, so now it's ingrained as a thing to poke fun.
- ginkgotree 3y agoThis is wild, I photograph with a Leica M7. If he sold these lenses, I'd buy one.