crosssection

This 1939 Cutaway Diagram Shows the Anatomy of a Leica Camera

When the Leica camera was born in the early 1900s, it was the first practical 35mm camera to use standard 35mm cinema film. In 1930, Leica introduced the Leica I Schraubgewinde, which used an interchangeable lens system based on the Leica LTM (Leica Thread Mount) 39mm screw thread.

Want a peek of the inner workings of Leica's early LTM camera? Today's your lucky day.

Nikon Sliced This D5 in Half to Reveal the DSLR’s Guts

Nikon's big announcement at CES 2016 in Las Vegas this year was the new flagship D5 DSLR. In the company's exhibition space, Nikon is displaying a Nikon D5 DSLR and Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens that have been sliced cleanly in half to show off the innards with a cross-section view.

Cross Section Photos of Fireworks Give Us a Peek Inside the BOOM

It's the fourth of July (on the off-chance didn't know), which means your Facebook feed is about to get flooded with firework photos from friends, family and professionals alike. But the firework photos in photographer Andrew Waits' series Boom City are unlike any others your likely to come across.

While most people take pictures of fireworks right after they explode, Waits took a different approach: he cut them open ahead of time to give us a peek at the insides.

Cross Section Photos of Golf Balls Reveal the Diverse Beauty Within

Photographer James Friedman doesn't play golf, but he had a collection of golf balls lying around. One day, he began to wonder what the guts of the golf balls look like, so he cut a ball open to take a peek at a core. Then he sliced open another, and another; after cutting open over twenty different types of golf balls, Friedman found a strange sort of beauty that he began to document through photographs. The resulting project is titled "Interior Design".

AMMO: Cross Section Photos of Bullets

In October of 2012, LA-based photographer Sabine Pearlman found herself ensconced in a Swiss WWII bunker photographing 900 different "specimens" of cross sectioned ammunition. Her resulting photo series, AMMO, shows the beauty and craftsmanship that went into creating these destructive little pieces of engineering.

Videos for Creating Cool 3D Light Objects Using Only a Tablet and Camera

We’ve shared a few pretty cool cross-section light painting projects before, but none of them were ever very... shall we say... cheery. Both projects -- 21:31 and Andy Leach's hologram photo -- were created using the same eerie video of human slices from the Visible Human Project. But for those who wanted to toy around with cross-section light painting and re-creating 3D light objects in their photos, that’s all they had.

Well, not anymore. Photographer Hugo Baptista has put together a Vimeo group called "Cross Section Objects for Light Painting". It contains a number of videos that you can load onto your tablet or smartphone and use to create 3D light painting objects.

Canon 1Ds and 400mm f/4 DO IS Lens Sliced Down the Middle

Leica and Sony aren't the only camera companies that slice their cameras and lenses down the middle to give the world a peek at their guts -- Canon does it too. On the first floor of one of its headquarter buildings in Japan is a small museum that has a cross-sectioned Canon 1Ds DSLR and 400mm f/4 DO IS USM lens on display. Back in the day, the camera had a price of $5,500 and the lens cost $8,900, meaning Canon sliced nearly $15,000 of gear in half for this display.

Cross Section Views of Leica Lenses

If colleges offered camera equipment anatomy classes, this Leica lens cutaway might be one of the things you'd be examining in the lab. It's a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm sliced cleanly down the middle, revealing all the glass and pieces inside that go into making the lens.