And yeah, is there someplace on FW where you talk about how you made your own lens? I keep wanting to do that but all the sites I find that talk about how to make your own lens are so involved that I always get confused and give up reading.
OK, so 2 things you need to know on this subject:
- If anything in photography becomes 'involved' or takes more than 20 minutes to complete, I don't do it. I'm not built that way in the brain and I don't usually have much more time than that to complete any single task.
- Usually when people like me write 'home made lens' what we really mean is 'taking a lens that someone manufactured and mounting it on a camera in some way or another. We're not out there grinding glass/plastic and shaping our own lenses as that would break the 20 minute rule.
Years ago, Susan Burnstine gave me a 10 minute Masterclass on 'home made lenses' based on her experiences of the previous couple of years; when that girl does things, she does them
properly. Everything I've done with modified/home made lenses since has been based on that conversation. So full credit due to her. Without that conversation I'd have been nowhere.
Anyway, I pretty much always use SLRs for obvious reasons given that I favour lenses which give a lot of distortion, a lot of blur and very shallow DOF. I generally use a single element lens. Susan told me right off the bat that the best thing to use was a loupe. Not wanting to copy her idea I spent many years using other lens combos (generally from other cameras, kids toys, binoculars etc.) before deciding to try a loupe and finding that, guess what? Yep, it worked really well
The way you fit the modified lens to your camera(s) depends on what the camera is, how good your are with your hands, and how anal you are about keeping your cameras clean. I used to use a Great Wall for all my lens mod experiments, but bought a Bronny S2A about 4 years ago and have found that to be an excellent camera for housing the modified lenses. As for the hands and the need to keep the camera clean...erm, not me on either score. I go simple and messy and use lots and lots of tape to construct a flexible (and reasonably lightproof) cone with the lens fixed at the top. See photo. It looks messy, but until you've tried the lens you're not really going to know whether it works, so investing a lot of time and effort in making a beautiful housing might be time wasted. Mine looks fugly.
I'm getting to the point with this setup that I like it so much I'm thinking of making something better (either out of rubber, or heavy cloth). When you make your housing make sure that you give yourself enough 'cone' to play with to enable you to focus at something approaching infinity. Depending on the lens you're using, you'll be surprised just how far away from the front of the camera the lens needs to be before it'll focus on the interesting tree 100 feet away.
Oh yeah, you'll need to work out the equivalent f stop for your new lens. Mine comes it at around f2,8. I worked this out precisely and with a fine degree of mathematical accuracy by looking at the f4,5 lens that came with my Bronny and guessing that the hole on the new lens was about twice as big. I've metered at f2,8 ever since and it's worked out fine.
Hope that helps dispel some of the myths that photo anoraks like to build up around lens mods. The truly hard part is taking a good picture once you're all set up....that bit never gets easier
