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I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

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Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#31

Post by gen3 »

Solvency wrote: post #15

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

A video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYvWpavSXeE

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#32

Post by eschneider »

jetrink wrote: post #25
hef19898 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, tho…

> 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 co…

Some lenses definitely have more chromatic aberration than others, completely independent of film or sensor.

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#33

Post by ddalex »

blagie wrote: post #26
hef19898 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tal…

Sort of. 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…

> it was optically brilliant

Of course, if it's a F/1.8

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#34

Post by hef19898 »

llm_trw wrote: post #23
i2pi wrote: post #2

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…

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-gami…

Why would you use ML to develop well understood formulas from first principle, if you can also have a properly developed program for the same purpose?

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#35

Post by metadat »

i2pi wrote: post #2

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…

Are you able to share any demonstration pics using your custom lens? Certainly a creative fun project.

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#36

Post by zabzonk »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #20
zabzonk wrote: post #14

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,…

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? https://www.timhunkin.com/a198_goodbye-cibachrome.htm Sadly, this marvellous paper - direct positive colour and easy to develop - is no…

i don't think i've ever known anything as magical as developing my first wet-photography print.

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#37

Post by metadat »

llm_trw wrote: post #23
i2pi wrote: post #2

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…

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-gami…

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolte_Bridge#/media/File%3ABol...

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#38

Post by araes »

dylan604 wrote: post #30
jollyllama wrote: post #24

At 02:29:50 you can see the shape of a skull form in the plants in the upper portion of the screen.

Maybe if you run ML on it, it will find Ryan Gosling?

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.

YT, voice copying demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwuAjeDOVE

arXiv, voice cloning detection: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12734.pdf

kaggle, Deep-Voice (support files): https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/birdy654/deep-voice-deepfake...

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.

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#39

Post by atoav »

i2pi wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: I made a bad camera lens from some old glasses [video]

#40

Post by dylan604 »

araes wrote: post #38
dylan604 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you run ML on it, it will find Ryan Gosling?

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. YT, voice copying demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwuAjeDOVE arXiv, voice cloning detection: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12734.pdf kaggle, Deep-Voice (support files): https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/birdy654/deep-voice-deepfake... Has voice cloning using Re…

No, there was some image processing that was trying to recognize shapes and kept finding Ryan Gosling in images.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650

So, maybe it wasn't "kept" but did it at least once, so now it's ingrained as a thing to poke fun.

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