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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Dorkbot-88

There was the Dorkbot’s 88th gathering.  

As its nature of their activity, it’s not quite a science or technology — rather

murky to comprehend, let alone to explain.  

—– So, please read those and try to make sense by yourself.

——————————————————————- 
With speakers including – but not restricted to…

Sarah Angliss
http://www.sarahangliss.com/
https://twitter.com/Therematrix
A preview of new work with breath sensors that Sarah’s been developing
at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol. Funded by Arts Council
England, it’ll be part of a drop-in participative performance at Vivid
Projects, Birmingham during this year’s Supersonic Festival.

A composer, multi-instrumentalist, roboticist and sound historian,
Sarah’s work explores her obsessions with defunct machinery, faded
variety acts and European folklore.

David Mills
http://apocalypto.org.uk/
https://twitter.com/DTL
#xraymylunch, #xraystuffinmylab, and using high contrast X-ray
microtomography (XMT) with advanced image processing algorithms to
read fragile historic documents.

Kasia Molga & Adrian Goodwin
http://www.kasiamolga.net/
https://twitter.com/olygamy
World Wilder Lab is a collective set up by Kasia Molga, Erik Overmeire
and Ivan Henriques. Together with Adrian Godwin we developed a device
called PlanEt which allows us to hack into whispers of plants. Now we
are trying to figure out what plants are saying…

William Trossell
http://scanlabprojects.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/ScanLABProjects
ScanLAB is an ongoing series of projects investigating the use of 3D
laser scanning in architecture, art and film, with subjects ranging
from Arctic ice floes to Mount Pleasant subterranean Mail Rail
station.

Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith
http://www.bycgwtsf.com/
https://twitter.com/stefandz
The weirdest things that people do with – and ask about – Bare
Conductive’s electrically conductive paint, plus the paint’s more
“unusual properties”.

To participate, I took my part with my murky photography.

(With the 100 year old German Anastigmat lens and a homemade

so-called “Gaudy Lens“.)  

It’s a blatant manifestation of the Anti Establishment stance and the

Counter Culture statement = in other words, the Anarchist’s message !   😀

In fact quite few participants are overlapping with anarchist’s group such as 

Space Hijacker and a guy above photo is running the Hack Space as well.

So, if you have any strange idea to speak, contact Dorkbot London.

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Reconstruct the Lens

A while ago, I made a so-called Gaudy Lens using old Olympus Film camera’s

lens barrel.   The Lens I’ve taken out from the camera was, usable optics — still

it was disassembled state.    In honest feering, I’m not keen to the lens itself —

38~80mm F5.6 “super” zoom is not impressive at all though, I just wanted to

reconstruct the lens for a kind of a game.  🙂  —– Putting back the gears etc to

reconstruct the focus control etc — though, since the lens was no longer in the

main barrel, there was no structure to hold the optics in the position = I needed

to improvise some structure to fix the lens position.

As seen on the photo above left, optics was tested while stucked by a plastic patte.

And an aluminium plate was made to fix to the rear element and the plate was

screwed to the front unit, then the exact distance was adjusted. (photo above right)

—– by the lens design, the zooming was made by the position of the rear element

— but now, the lens was mounted on the DSLR body, and no zooming mechanism,

the lens works as a 60mm F5.6  only.  —– The game done.  🙂

(You must be amazed how the camera lens can be handled in such a casual manner.

= Yes, they were made by just another human. = It’s not a rocket science.   😀 )

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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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Fancy a Fancy Lens ?

Among my weird looks (often its function too) lenses this is the most fancy one.  

It was made out of the front element of a cheap fish-eye converter and 

the focusing element of the discarded Canon G9 compact camera.

(As the focusing lens had stepping motor built-in, I thought I could make

“Focus Shift” unit though, it didn’t work with strong front concave lens)

So, this fancy lens does just ordinary job = able to take mediocre photo.  😀

Just like as a 60th Instamatic Camera, (though on a rather expensive setting)

the lens works just as a camera lens and produce “so so” kind of the images.

— still, considering it has only two lenses = front concave lens and the lear

convex lens and no focus at all,  it wasn’t too bad.

—–> with a kind of routine test here, this lens showed this character :

Since this wasn’t an omnifocus type of the lens, I needed to give a focus for close shot.

(Lens wasn’t fully inserted into the camera = about 2mm lifted-up from the mount)

= with the best focus, its image was surprisingly good ! (Photo left and the center)

But, when lens was fully mounted, the image was hopeless. (Photo right)

—– I’m not sure whether this lens ever become my fancy  🙂

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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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Rhododendron in the Park — by Focus Shift

Long time ago, I was seeing the Rhododendron in the mountain.  

Then I saw them in the Kew Garden —– I’m afraid those memories

 are getting afar and fading.   Now, I’m seeing a bit in a local park,

— may be I should be contented or I need to be thankful that I did

have the struggle to go through gorgeous bush of Rhododendron.

I don’t know why the fragile sister of Rhododendron was named Azarea.

To know about the “Focus Shift” please go to the previous post and the links.

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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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