I 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.
I 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...
> I swear the only thing that the Bolte Bridge attracts more of than seagulls is photographers.
Thanks for encouraging me to search about it, and quickly realize Bolte Bridge is a natural target due to relative level of architectural sophistication as well as being easily accessible.
Yes, 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.
All 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.
My 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!
i 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.
Much 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?
No argument! But it was fun to have experienced it; in my case starting photography as a hobby and going digital were just over a decade apart. Favourite part was being able to extract the coiled film from the tank in full light and peer at the negatives for the first time and then making a contact print sheet. Making enlarged prints was relative drudgery.
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.
First project in my high school photography class (before we even touched anything having to do with a film camera) was to make and use a pinhole camera— body made of cardboard and tape, “lens” a piece of foil with a hole in it, and “film” a 4x5 bit of photo paper.
It’s a great way both to explain the whole premise behind photography (your fancy camera and lens is just an elaborate way to project an image onto a bit of light-sensitive stuff that you otherwise keep in the dark) and to give students some early hands-on experience developing prints without all the intervening steps involved in making a print from film.
If 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.
If 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".
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.
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
I 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.
Once 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
Feel 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.
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.
"...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. "
Thing 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).
My universe broke when Sigma introduced an 18-35mm f/1.8 zoom. An f/1.8 zoom. Wow. And it was optically brilliant.
Seventies lenses are super-sharp, but that's because they're mostly slow primes. Any modern prime stepped down to f/5.6 -- even cheap consumerific ones -- will be super-sharp.
There's nothing in seventies technology which allows lenses to have the aperture, zoom range, and aberrations of modern ones.
Appertures, well, those f2.8 Nikkor telephotos from that period still demand high prices for a reason. And f4.5 isn't that slow, even compared to modern zooms. Or those old 50/1.4 (agreed, the 1.8 versions seem to be tad better) and other 1.8 primes. Still great glass. Or those unaffordable NOCT lenses... Not sure what I would need one for so.
What those old lenses have so, is build quality. They are machnical master pieces, as oppossed to modern day plastics. I like that. Also, close to no electronics that can fail.
Those wide zoom ranges, and large appertures, do have other downsides so. Everything is a trade off, and some things are sacrificed to achieve a 18-35/1.8 lense. Still impressive. Or the latest Canon (?) patent on a tilt-shift-macro-zoom...
Virtually nothing, except weight, was sacrificed to make the 18-35mm f/1.8 zoom. That's why it's impressive.
It's possible due to things like:
- Much better lens coatings (allowing for more elements without flare)
- Computer modelling
- Being able to better machine aspherical elements
On integrated cameras, like an RX100, we can do even better due to digital. We don't need low-distortion, but just well-characterized distortion which a computer can invert.
Those old lenses -- at least the ones still working -- do have build quality. Adjust their prices at the time for inflation, and have a look at modern Zeiss, Leica, and other premium lenses. You'll see similar build quality.
For fun, next time you're looking at old lenses, pick up a Quantaray too, for fun. Or most older (before around 2000) Sigma lenses. Or other off-brands. You'll see unparalleled build quality, but in the other direction -- eighties-era plastic. The optical quality is bad. Not "fun" bad, "vintage" bad, or "whimsical" bad, but just bad.
When we look at older stuff, we tend to look at stuff which stuck around, but even that Quantaray is high-end compared to an older consumer camera. Most people who owned a camera had a non-SLR one. You looked through a little window on top, and the pictures were shot through the main lens. Those were even worse. Or a disposable (a single plastic element lens).
That's not how it works. The wider the aperture, the worse the aberrations. IF you can make a lens usable at f/1.8, it will be tack-sharp stepped down. That's why wide primes have a reputation for being super-sharp.
Roughly the same optical design, limited to f/2.8, will be better in all respects.
A good way to think about this -- oversimplified obviously -- is you have a bunch of functions you're trying to cancel with e.g. a linear combination. If you look really close to the center, it's already a flat line. If you step out a little, two are adequate (have the slopes cancel). As you go further and further out, things become increasingly wonky. That's why you have super-complex designs for an f/1.8 zoom -- to get that cancellation right -- but even a single element works fine at f/22.
There actually were f/1.8 zooms all along, but for applications which didn't demand that sharpness (TV and CCTV). You can pick those up cheap and see what happens. They're sometimes fun on a real camera too (many will span a μ4/3 sensor with just a tad of vignetting).
I have a very acclaimed old design 50/1.5 lens (but was bought new), but it just sucks compared with a modern much cheaper 50-70/3.5. The colors in particular, they are just bad. I'm not sure what test would pick that, a color accuracy kind of test. Modern coatings truly do wonders.
Depends on the lenses, of course. There are still enough crappy new lenses on the market so.
Color rendition is also impacted by the sensor, assuming digital cameras.
Since I don't know which lenses you talk about, hard to tell. I do have some really old ones, 80-200 f 4.5 from the late 70s and an equally old 300 f4.5. Both render color just fine, no difference between those and new Nikkor lenses. Sharpness wise, those old ones are easily as sharp as any new one, lab test confirm that. And the limited amount of glass gives them, a totally subjective, clarity new lenses don't have. Bot that I would d be able to tell just from looking at a printed or processed picture.
> Color rendition is also impacted by the sensor, assuming digital cameras.
Particularly since the old lens was designed for film, perhaps even black and white film. The choice of film has a much larger impact on color rendition than the lens would have. Also, unlike sharpness, color rendition is highly subjective and easily corrected. If you're shooting to JPG and you don't like how the camera is interpreting the colors from a lens, most cameras allow you to customize the white balance.
Chromatic aberration is a type of optical distortion and is a separate issue to color rendition. Color rendition refers to the lens's ability to transmit light equally across the color spectrum. If the lens is more transparent to red wavelengths than blue, images will look warmer, for example. Chromatic aberration, on the other hand, is a type of distortion in which a lens fails to focus all colors to the same convergence point. It will negatively affect image quality even if you use the lens to take black and white photos, since the result is a blurrier image.
Can confirm. I just finished a short film where I used a Minolta Rokkor 45mm f/2.0 for the close ups, on a GH5, and I loved the look. Beautiful colors, very nice bokeh, pretty sharp even when fully open (I guess the crop from 35mm to M4/3 helps).
If 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.
Really? 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.
Vintage lenses describes an entire category. Not all of them are hidden gems. In fact, the vast majority of them aren't.
I'm primarily doing videography, but most of the vintage lenses I've tested are too soft to crop a 1080p vertical "short"-style video out of a 4K landscape video (even though the landscape video may look fine).
It's not just my old konica minolta lenses, though, the more affordable Sony lenses from 2015 are just as bad.
I'm now using contemporary fujinon cine lenses and they're tack sharp all the way to the edge, even fully open at T/2.8
That said: If you've got hidden gems, or like the less clinical look of vintage lenses, go ahead, have fun!
Ah, videography, that changes things. I only shoot stills, so I have no idea how video works.
And yes, not all vintage lenses are good. One has to go look for the good ones, usually the top line pro lenses of the day, those are still very good.
The one, cardinal thing about gear is so, once it hits a certain threshold of performance, e.g. "good" 4k video, whatever makes you feel good is great gear. Doesn't have to be the newest and shiniest, nor a specific brand or something.
My vintage glass so is neither soft nor sub-par, for my purposes, optically. Well, they do have a certain clarity to them, especially for blavk and white, that I like. I also know it is in my head, as I actually cannot tell those lenses apart from new glass by just looking at the pictures. I do like the incredible mechanical build quality so, they are master pieces of precision mechanics in all metal, and I like that feeling using them.
While not always true, there is a connection between price and quality: cheap / affordable products are generally less good than expensive ones, at the same time there can be incredibly good cheap products and crappy expensive ones, also the expensive ones can be bad value by virtue of being overpriced.
I heard good things about Fujinon, never tried them so.
