When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940′s at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.
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I have a small obsession with cameras, also, a slightly smaller obsession with film cameras. My favourite camera is Lubitel 166B. It is a medium format camera, this basically means it has a large image area to capture photos, using the larger 120mm film. The Lubitel’s were twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras. They have a little pop up cover on top, you then look down through the viewfinder. The nature of holding the camera like this will getting the settings set up for the shot can sometimes be a pain, so having a nice strap to hold it at the correct height, and nice and steady is a great idea.
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Mats Wernersson’s website is aptly named, “The Camera Maker“. Wernersson creates his own custom cameras by hand, making everything from 9×12 field cameras to “frankencameras” created for specific purposes from existing bodies. The above camera is a 3D 35mm camera created by fusing two Konica FS1 bodies together.
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Bristol-based artist Luke Jerram had this novel wedding ring designed for his wife Shelina Nanji. The ring, created in a collaboration with jeweler Tamrakar, contains tiny slides of the couple. When placed in a darkened room with a light source behind it, the slides can be projected through the mini lens built into the ring.
Jerram says the ring was inspired by Stanhopes, which were popular trinkets during the 19th century, by which microphotographs could be carried and viewed inside.
Not surprisingly, Jerram gets asked to make this ring frequently for other couples, but he politely declines — this ring was a unique design made specially for his wife.
(via Make)
Stereo Portrait Project, by Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo, is a 3D photography exhibition documenting Australian creatives. Their version 1.0 rig used two Nikon D90 DSLR cameras attached to a custom camera rig, separated by a distance that is intended to emulate human eyes.
They tell Nikon Rumors,
To synchronize the cameras we used an RF trigger split out to two preload shutter release cables. We tested how fast we could sync both shutters together with the flashes, and got reliable sync up to 1/160 speed. Giving us the ability to have people move around, talk to us and not inhibit their performance. This was very important since hands in front of the body look fantastic in 3d.
The photographs were sorted in Aperture, exported to Nuke (compositing software) and tweaked, and finally combined into 3D photos. Here’s an example:
Sadly, you’ll need 3D glasses to appreciate these photographs. I just ordered a pair for about $1.50 on eBay, since it’ll probably be useful to have a pair lying around as 3D continues to explode.
The show is running at the Oh Really Gallery in Sydney, Australia from May 27 to June 10, 2010.
peekfreak is a collaborative project between industrial designer Wai Lam and experimental photographer Yann Huey in which they explore the possibility of making cameras using everyday objects. The cameras they’ve made so far use things such as discarded bike parts, plastic containers, and 3.5” floppy disks.
The cameras are extremely minimalistic, and the sliding metal cover of the floppy disk is used as a simple shutter mechanism to expose the film. Check out the innards:
Since the cameras are so randomly put together, the resulting photographs have their unique looks depending on construction:
If getting weird looks while doing photography is your thing, then these cameras are for you! They aren’t for sale and there isn’t any tutorial on how to make these, but the cameras are simple enough that you should be able to figure it out from the photographs.
Image credits: Photographs by peekfreak
Stephen Von Worley over at Weather Sealed just received a lens he calls “The Glass Frisbee”. In the photo above it’s placed next to a Canon 50mm f/1.4 for size comparison. It’s a $250, 195mm f/1.25 lens that’s sold to people who need it for custom uses. The description on Surplus Shed says,
We believe these will make great wide field low power telescopes, incredible binoculars especially suited for low light conditions, or astrographs. Other uses may be for building a camera, projector, HDTV projection, telephoto, finder for your huge scope, low light compact camera obscura, etc, etc.
Von Worley plans to use his for large format photography:
I bought the Frisbee for its incredible combination of 200mm focal length and f/1.3 aperture, which I’ll use to push the limits of narrow depth of field. By the laws of physics, once shoehorned onto my large-format 4×5 monorail camera, it’s the optical equivalent of a 50mm f/0.35 lens on a full-frame SLR.
Until he gets around to it, he’s using the lens as photography-nerd bling:
You can read more about it here.
Image credits: Photographs by Stephen Von Worley
