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102 year old lens attached to digital camera

cinema5d.com

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Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#21

Post by jacobolus »

js2 wrote: post #16
stinkytaco wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article also specifies the type of lens: > This is a circa 1908 Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand cranked cinema camera lens Which is not a Canon lens. In other words, he probably should have read the article.

I read the link and I wasn't denigrating it at all. I was just trying to point out that it reminded me of the Nikon F-Mount which has been a very durable mount. For many photographers, lenses are the most expensive part of the camera system and it's nice that Nikon has kept their camera bodies backwards compatible with their lenses for 50 years. It is also largely forward compatible (allowing modern Nikon lenses to b…

It’s pretty fun that for all the technological camera changes we’ve seen in 100 years, the optical core of these systems is pretty much the same: a lens with a shutter whose image circle covers (in the most popular case) a 24×36 mm rectangle.

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#22

Post by sbierwagen »

Not extraordinarily unusual. All you have to do is align the focal plane of the lens with the camera sensor. Usually this is done with a metal flange of greater or lesser complexity. Here he just had to adapt the threads on the lens to the threads on the camera body. Twenty minutes in any well-equipped machine shop.

Modern lenses are very complicated, because they work to cancel out all sorts of subtle and troublesome distortions, but a lens can be very simple indeed. A Lensbaby[1] is just a single lens element attached to some stiff bellows.

And that's it.

You could hand it to Robert Hooke and he would nod in comprehension. He might find the plastics more interesting, but the point is, you could have built a Lensbaby at any point in the last three hundred years.

You can get even simpler than that, as my link notes. Poke a hole in a body cap with a hot needle, and you've made a pinhole "lens", which is thousand year old technology.[2]

1: http://www.dansdata.com/lensbaby.htm for an excellent review. He's actually reviewing a Lensbaby 2, which uses a doublet instead of a single uncoated lens, to reduce chromatic aberration and flare, which is quite missing the point, I feel.

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#23

Post by kjuhyghjk »

jnovek wrote: post #19
ilamont wrote: post #18

No background in optics, physics or serious photography, but I am curious: What sorts of effects or "feel" does an ancient lens like this typically generate, and why? For instance, will the lens elongate, fade, or gather microscopic pitting?

My money's on that this lens is a Cooke Triplet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooke_triplet which was (and is) a fairly neutral lens design. There is some astigmatic aberration as well as vignetting visible in the photos provided, but it's possible that this lens was intended for a smaller image circle than 24x36 sensor in the 5DmkII. All lenses will have astigmatic aberration and vignetting at the edge of their image…

And this lens is likely to be f5.6 or slower - it's a lot easier to make a 35mm f5.6 design than a modern f1.2 !

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#24

Post by jacobolus »

kjuhyghjk wrote: post #23
jnovek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My money's on that this lens is a Cooke Triplet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooke_triplet which was (and is) a fairly neutral lens design. There is some astigmatic aberration as well as vignetting visible in the photos provided, but it's possible that this lens was intended for a smaller image circle than 24x36 sensor in the 5DmkII. All lenses will have astigmatic aberration and vignetting at the edge of their image…

And this lens is likely to be f5.6 or slower - it's a lot easier to make a 35mm f5.6 design than a modern f1.2 !

f/5.0, the link said.

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#25

Post by borism »

js2 wrote: post #7

So this is a 102 year old lens mounted on modern Canon DSLR. Obviously it requires an adapter to physically mate the two. Not to take anything away from that, but I thought I'd point out that you can mount 50 year old Nikon lenses on modern Nikon DSLRs, no adapter required, due to Nikon's commitment to the F-mount it introduced in 1959: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_F-mount

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-mount

T-mount beats F-mount by 2 years. It's not as elegant as F-mount, but it's very simple - essentially a screw.

I use it with adapter to attach my Nikon DSLR to a telescope.

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#26

Post by Construct »

sbierwagen wrote: post #22

Not extraordinarily unusual. All you have to do is align the focal plane of the lens with the camera sensor. Usually this is done with a metal flange of greater or lesser complexity. Here he just had to adapt the threads on the lens to the threads on the camera body. Twenty minutes in any well-equipped machine shop. Modern lenses are very complicated, because they work to cancel out all sorts of subtle and troublesom…

Not extraordinarily unusual...

This person stumbled upon a 100+ year-old cinema lens and thought to adapt it to a modern DSLR, take some excellent pictures with a wonderful vintage feel, and post them online for all of us to share. I would most certainly call that unusual.

Let's give credit where credit is due. This is a wonderful and novel piece of work and I'm definitely grateful that s/he chose to share it with us.

Re: 102 year old lens attached to digital camera

#27

Post by revdinosaur »

ilamont wrote: post #18

No background in optics, physics or serious photography, but I am curious: What sorts of effects or "feel" does an ancient lens like this typically generate, and why? For instance, will the lens elongate, fade, or gather microscopic pitting?

One of the major difference is lens coating. Uncoated glass reflects roughly 7% of light per element. On a simple normal-length prime like this it may not be a huge issue, but you would see a major difference with a longer focal length consisting more elements.

Visually, coated lenses yield more contrast. In the case of more modern (usually after the 70's) multi-coated lenses, there is also a UV-reducing layer that maintains more detail at a distances due to minimized haziness.

Some of my favorite examples of a classic, uncoated lens showing its effect are from the Lewis Hines photos of the Empire State Building construction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_timer_structural_worke...

There is some obvious dodging and burning done to this print in particular (the worker has been darkened compared with the cityscape in the background) but notice how much the detail fades with distance.

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