Zeiss and Zeiss — (Last shot on the Flower Patch)

It’s still a day before Summer Solstice though, the flower patch

I’ve been photographing was coming to the end.  So, seemingly this

was the last shot there and for this occasion, I used the recycled 

£1 Zeiss Talon lens and the genuine Carl Zeiss Planar 85mm F1.4 

T* lens on Canon 5D Mk-III for a comparison.

On the photos above, left was shot by Talon lens and the right was

by the Planar F1.4 lens.  Since Talon lens was F2.8, the F1.4 lens 

 at F1.4 showed much shallower depth of field.

And here, the left photo was taken by Talon lens and the right photo 

was by the Planar F1.4 lens, but as the modified Talon lens got quite 

long focusing helicoid (it was not a screw helicoid but a rotating cam) 

which allows the 1/3 close-up, against this, 85mm F1.4 lens can close 

only to 1m (1/12), hence the photo right was a heavily cropped image. 

—– still, they showed amazingly similar characteristics, such as

the type of Bokeh.

And the rest of the photos here were from the £1 Recycled Lens = “Zeiss Talon Lens”

In fact, I was rather impressed by this quality performance !

As this lens was designed for a projector lens, (= never used for infinity) 

it was pretty good in close-up work !  (Ordinary lens was designed to work 

best in the infinity and the macro lens was designed to be best in the x10

magnification.) — Then give a thought, if a lens of 2 or 3 lenses structure 

could give such good performance, why we DO need to have an elaborated,

heavy, expensive lens.  (Mind you, all those photos were taken at fully open

F2.8 = anyhow no Iris there.)  😀    

But, this last photo was by the Planar F1.4 lens at F1.4 (all photos’  

aperture were fully open). —– Recycled 50 years old lens costed me   

£1 and the 85mm F1.4 lens was £600 even for a secondhand.

= May be we should start to think about what we really need from

a camera lens.  Like a so-called HD sound (called Hi-Resi in Japan)

do we need such a high resolution —– Does it make any difference

on our life ? — Wasn’t that mere illusion created by the company and

a ploy to sell yet another new model to us ?

What the photo image meant to us ? — DO we ever watched the world

in 10MP details, let alone to remember in such a detail ? ? ?    😀

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Modifying the Zeiss Lens

The story started when I found the same Olympus camera in a junk shop, 

of which I’ve used its lens barrel to make the “Gaudy Lens”.

Since I’ve disassembled this camera and already know the structure, in this

time I unscrewed only few crucial screws and took out just the lens barrel.

(so far, this lens barrel is the most useful component I found and I was

going to use it to modify the £1 Zeiss lens .) —– This Carl Zeiss projection

Lens was mere £1, still having Zeiss quality and the distinctive character

though, as it was a projection lens, there was no focusing helicoid or

Iris kind to use it for taking a photo. = It’s shame to be wasted as a junk

despite it got fine optics. (And the reason why I bought it was, of course,

I was going to use it for taking photos. — I’ve tested it on the homemade

bellows but, it is better to have a convenient focusing helicoid.)

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To mount the Zeiss lens onto the Olympus barrel, the pipe of the

Zeiss Lens has to be narrowed down. (Photo above middle and the right) =

(It’s a simple work to file down the plastic pipe = simple but laborious.  🙂

—– it is a kind of the work, a Buddhist is quite good at ! —– remember

an old say  “Dripping water can curve a rock” )

 = Anyhow, on the end, the Zeiss

 lens was fitted in the Olympus barrel

 and they were screwed onto a Canon

 mount adapter. = And now, the Zeiss

Talon Lens is working on a Canon DSLR

while giving the focus from infinity to 1/3 close-up !

—– The photo here right, showed a remarkable similarity of the

softness of the other Zeiss Lens !

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Gaudy Lens — with one F-stop “less gaudy” Image

Gaudy lens was intended to fill the gap between “Double-Density Pinhole”

and the “Two Element homemade Lens” with added convenience of the

easy focus.  In a quality of the image, DD Pinhole has no details of the subject

= totally paintary image.    And an omnifocus Two Element Lens has certain

softness, still not so strong. —– I wanted to have somewhere between.

 Though, the original Gaudy Lens 

 showed too strong halation = so that,

 I made it a bit less by reducing its

 effective aperture for one stop.

 = 33mm x 0.7 = 23mm (equivalent 

of F1.8 down to F2.5) 

(It was done by placing a black paper with 23mm hole, back of the lens.)

So, they are the answer. = fuzzy enough but not too much.  🙂

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Gaudy Lens, gaudy images

They are the pictures of the first field test of a homemade lens I described

on the previous post, the Gaudy Lens.

The lens is a single meniscus magnifier lens with no coating, hence a lots of

aberration, halation was unavoidable —– in fact that was what I wanted

and the very purpose to make this lens.

Same as a bright light, the strong bright color causes strong halation too.

— even worse, the fuzzy image needed to have a bit more contrast =

increased highlight = brighter color spread more. It’s an orgie of the color.

Thank you very much to see all through the photos.  In the next post, I’ll put

a bit more moderate version of the same flowers.

(With a trick of a piece of small paper.)  🙂

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How about a Glittering Gaudy Lens ?

Do you know, this is called “Kawaii” in the Japanese norm today.

Settle with flowers to create Kawaii image was rather casual approach though,

otherwise — kitten’s picture if not small child or young girl.

— But these days, to deal with child or young girl, the risque is too high.

So, I would rather choose a camera. —– best of all, it’s cost virtually nothing.

Here, it was a 30 years old Olympus film camera.    The camera of that

age is much easier to disassemble and to utilize its mechanism.

 The camera then had auto-winding-up, rewind (Photo above left = the 

train of gears on the bottom of the body convey the power of the motor in

the winding-up spool to the rewinding fork), auto-focus, collapsible lens

etc, very useful mechanism though, “fully auto” then did not necessary 

had everything. = The exposure control was done by one mechanism = 

= two L-shaped blades worked as a Shutter and an Iris same time.

(Photo above, right)   Under the bright light, the blades open very little  

and close quick = worked as high speed shutter with small F-aperture.

And when it was dark, blades will fully open and close after a while, 

so in any condition, it gave a combination of somewhere between.

(Though, such mechanism is not useful anywhere else.)

What I found useful was their zoom lens barrel.  I removed all the lens

and the mechanism then I put a single meniscus lens. (So that the zoom

barrel became a focusing helicoid for the lens which can give the focus

from infinity to 1/2 close up.)  This lens has about 60mm focal length

and the diameter of 35mm = effectively F1.8.

The lens had no coating and such single lens has a lots of aberrations and

the halation of which I’m after and this lens got glittering gold encoder.

— isn’t it gorgeous or bad taste ?  😀       ( I didn’t put — it was there.)

Incidentally, this lens showed this character (and see the difference)

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Forget me not — by Focus Shift (yet again)

Yet again Focus Shift photos — in fact all of those flower photos in the park 

were taken in one session, just in a different corner.

The lenses used were either Canon FD 50 mm F1.8 or Canon EFS 18~55 mm IS-II.

The photos which showed closer, hence more out-of-focus bokeh were taken

by 50 mm lens otherwise they were taken by EFS zoom (often on wider setting).

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Flowers in the Park — by Focus Shift

In here the shots of the Flowers in the Park, taken by Focus Shift 

using the Canon FD 50 mm F1.8 or EFS 18~55 Zoom lens. 

Well, not necessary everything was flower.  🙂

Since this plant above is a cousin of Hydrangea, the white decorative part around 

are not a flower, in strict botanical term, they are called sepals (a kind of leaf).

As the camera was hand-held, not only the Bokeh created by the shifted focus

(= intentionally added out-of-focus bokeh) but also the blurr by the shake

might be mixed as well.  Shifting the focus on the Canon EFS zoom was done

by driving their AF motor and the FD 50 mm lens was purposely modified to

do the shift.

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Flower Patch (6) — Canon FD 50mm F1.8 Focus Shift

While a patch of flowers are blooming, I should test the Lenses as many as possible.

So, on this post, it was the Canon FD 50 mm F1.8 which was modified to have a motorized

focus.  Funnily enough, the controller of this operation was not that device I’ve designed

for focus-shift but for vibrating a lens.  Despite the battery voltage was low

(nominal 3.7 V battery could give 4.2 V soon after a flesh charge), I found that the

 same device could work for focus-shift as well with some adjustment of the timing.

Unlike the other Lenses of Canon EFS 18~55mm or Tamron &0~300mm, this

50mm lens was worked well on a hand-held shooting, and the pictures’

highlight got pretty smooth halo on them.  = That was what I wanted.

The lens was mounted in the plastic barrel which came from a broken Canon

compact camera G9, and with its barrel, the lens can extend to a close-up range

= almost 1/2 size though, unfortunately a blurring halo is an arch enemy of a

macro photography. —– still, some time, the result looks not too bad.  

(See the Bokeh on the blue flower, photo above, (click to enlarge) = they

don’t follow the “Depth of field” ! —– I don’t know how the 5D processed it )

When the lens was re-constructed in the G9’s barrel, I didn’t put the Iris,

therefore this lens is always fully open F1.8 = in this condition, quality of 

the image was rather good.   (You may feel, it’s too funny of me to say that

— Yes, a man after fuzzy image still see an importance of the sharpness)  🙂

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Flower Patch (5) — by 2-Element Homemade Lens (B)

2Ele Nikon

And the lens here was the other one, for Nikon mount type.  

Nikon fitting can be mounted 

on a Canon Eos body but not 

the other way round because 

the Nikon body (its frange-back 

on the Lens mount) is 2.5 mm

 thicker = Canon Lens on a Nikon body

can’t have an infinity focus but in the other hand, a mount 

converter on Canon for Nikon can have 2.5 mm to play with.

(Photo above, the lens was fitted with Nikon to EOS adapter.)

—– the reason why I further made Nikon type of this lens was,

“I wanted to have this fuzzy image in 32 MP sensor”— serious !   

(but the Canon is going to have 50 MP soon, how interesting.

—– Why 200K kind of image needs 20Mb size details ?

= this is THE Paradox — or joke Sir.   😀  )

Those two have a similar structure though, looks very different.

= Nikon type is much smaller still, as its front lens got stronger

curvature, it got stronger distortion.  And unlike Canon type,

I didn’t put an Iris (hole in a black-tape) the image has more flair.

—– (for a sake of choice, I left this fuzziness as it is.)

I got quite few lenses which give me sharp image, so it’s nice to have other

choices of the lenses which could create fuzzy, painterly images from subtle

to utterly impressionists painting like one.  The beauty of this exercise is,

I don’t need to rely on the tool (so called program) somebody else has made.

My art has to be created by myself and for it, I don’t use a readymade template.

(of cause, I didn’t make 5D camera myself, still some time I do.)   Ha ha ha.

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Flower Patch (4) — by 2-Element Homemade Lens (A)

There are two “2-Element Homemade Lens” = both were based on the

(supposedly) same toy camera lens (seems to have 27 mm focal length) but

one was using HOYA short-eyesight specs lens to lengthening the focal 

length, suits for a full-frame Canon 5D.  The other was using a strong concave

lens, came from a discarded zoom’s front element, and I made this for Nikon 

(though, for this test, I’ve used it on 5D with “Nikon to EOS” mount adapter.)  

As the original lens was designed for focus-free, they are the easiest  lens to 

use = unlike Pinhole, at least I could see the finder image, still no need to focus 

= just click, thanks to the camera’s AV mode.   🙂

And the photos in this post were taken by the HOYA-Canon type.

As focus-free, the lens could capture from quite close range to the distant subject

with very reasonable quality with an added “good” softness and the good deal of

halation which makes me smile with fun.  🙂

(though, I haven’t established whether its softness was the toy camera’s inherent character

 or caused by the added lens —– whichever the cause, it wouldn’t spoil my fun.)

And the images made by the toy camera lens (hence, close-up only) was in this post.

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