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A Camera Lens Made from an Iceberg
- tosser0001 8y agoSkip the blog spam: https://www.mathieustern.com/blog/2018/10/22/l437fjpq58g619vlkm6t1iwhk8s6dr https://www.mathieustern.com/blog/2018/10/22/l437fjpq58g619v...
- pcardoso 8y agoIt is a blog but I wouldn't say it is spam. It doesn't just link to the content. Kottke posts are usually as entertaining and thoughtful as the content it links to.
- Belphemur 8y agoI agree that this should be the link for the post. You also have all the different pictures in a nice slider.
- sctb 8y agoThanks, we've updated the link from https://kottke.org/19/02/a-camera-lens-made-from-an-iceberg https://kottke.org/19/02/a-camera-lens-made-from-an-iceberg.
- fixermark 8y agoIt gives a nice soft, watery focus, it appears. :)
- dwighttk 8y agoThat video is the definition of overwrought
- Brendinooo 8y agoReminds me of my high school photography class, where we made camera obscuras (pinhole cameras) out of an oatmeal container. Did it make the best-quality images? No. But it was still one of the more memorable projects I did in high school.
- deanclatworthy 8y ago> I needed to find pure ice. No you didn't. You could have done this with warm distilled water, then frozen, at home and had better results. But I suppose it's a good excuse to go to Iceland :) (If there was ever a need for an excuse!)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoBut then it wouldn't be "10,000 years old" :-)
- delinka 8y ago>Iceland glaciers takes 10 000 years to purify the particles inside the ice. There's lots going on there, none of which I am a fan.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoHence the :-) in my comment. What I took from the article was the wonder the author felt at "touching" history in this way. It is similar to picking up a fossil and knowing that a very long time ago something lived and died and you are now holding its imprint from so long ago. Many people I know have had a moment in their life where the concept of how fleeting our lives are really struck them to their core. Often it comes with a change in outlook on the value of their remaining time on the planet.
- zeristor 8y agoLike seeing ammonite fossil shells in the paving stone of shopping centres. I wonder where fossilised humans will turn up in 200 million years...
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI wondered if you could actually do something not quite like that, which is create a quartz version of yourself and then embed that in a chunk of concrete or something and bury it so that 10,000 years from now someone could "unpack" it.
- cromwellian 8y agoCouldn't you just make distilled water clear ice at home, or does it need high pressure to remove aberrations?
- m31415 8y agoChromatic aberrations cannot be removed using a material of just one refractive index. And as the video shows this lens has chromatic aberrations.
- cromwellian 8y agoSome of the blurriness seems related to melting on the surface layer. I wonder if he had made a metallic lens housing which was supercooled to prevent melting if the result would have been better.
- kenneth 8y agoUsing distilled water doesn't make ice much clearer. There will always be impurities (like air) in the water which get pushed towards the center of the ice as it freezes. Another issue is that ice is less dense than water, so in a partially frozen ice cube the center will require more space when frozen than is currently available, leading to cracks. To get clear ice, you need to freeze water directionally, in layers. It's the only way to get clear ice.
- cromwellian 8y agoI make clear ice at home with those specialized insulated/rubberized coolers. The distilled part I mentioned is in relation to impurities and that glacial ice was the most “pure”. Is that really true? Can’t glacial ice have trapped impurities and gasses? I guess what I’m getting at is, the claim that glacial ice was needed, what particular property of glacial ice can’t be replicated by careful ice making?
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoGlacial ice is just compacted snow so you're going to have some amount of other crap in it (hence why we use ice cores to learn about the atmosphere at the time of their formation). Glacial ice that includes whatever year some big volcano went bang is probably not going to make a very good lens. I suspect that lab ice made with the express intention of being clean would be far cleaner.
- m31415 8y agoWhy is this surprising at all? Any transparent material having a refractive index larger than air can be made to work as a lens. Pinhole cameras are much more interesting than this -- there the phenomena isn't refraction. An even more interesting lens is the Frensel lens [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
- floatingatoll 8y agoI, personally, have never considered shaping a piece of ice into a temporary camera lens. It's awesome, because someone's done it, and no one thought to previously. It's surprising that no one's done it, because in hindsight it's obvious. Why hasn't someone done this previously and posted on the Internet about it? Because human ingenuity is awesome. CORRECTION: A piece of _iceberg_, which makes this all even _more_ awesome.
- toss1 8y agoIt is very cool. While he's possibly the first to think of it in a photography context, I have heard of an ice lens being recommended in a survival context -- fashion a lens to start a fire with the sun. I've had no idea if it is actually practical; I'm sure you'd need some very good dry & fluffy tinder. This photo experiment tilts it much further into the 'Plausible' zone.
- moron4hire 8y agoI can see that being possible. Cold, winter air is very dry. And frozen water doesn't tend to seep into things.
- lultimouomo 8y agoMythbusters tried this and got some smoke, but IIRC not actual flames. Seemed to be pretty possible though.
- blcArmadillo 8y agoWhile not a lens shaped from ice there are people who have been working on lenses made from untraditional materials. For example here is a guy, Prof. Joshua Silver's, who has been working on eyeglasses for the developing world. From https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302550.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302550.php: > Each lens is made of two flexible membranes that move either inward or outward depending on the amount of fluid - a silicone solution - they contain. > The lenses are connected to a small syringe that sits on each arm of the glasses, and the wearer can adjust a dial on the syringe to pump fluid in or out of each lens. When fluid is pumped in, the power of the lens is increased - correcting hyperopia, or farsightedness - while pumping fluid out decreases lens power, correcting nearsightedness. Additionally he gave a Ted talk on the subject https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liqui.... Pretty interesting stuff. Granted this is all circa 2009-2015. Not sure what the current status of the project is.
- equivocates 8y agoThe lens is not very sharp.
- somacert 8y agoMaking optical grade ice is not trivial. Not hard but I never did get good results. Start with good water. Freeze in a gradient(top down is easiest) half of your ice will still be garbage. Explicitly: by gradient I mean put it in an insulated container so that it freezes starting at the top and ending at the bottom.
- dekhn 8y agoBTW, this reminds me of an easy way to make a GRIN lens: http://www.laurawaller.com/opticsfun/sugarGRINlens.htm http://www.laurawaller.com/opticsfun/sugarGRINlens.htm
- aidenn0 8y agoThat's neat; a friend of mine made a GRIN lens by letting gelatin set in a cup on a turntable; the density increased with the radius so it acted as a concave lens despite being disc shaped.
- kenneth 8y agoWhy is top down easier? I have a few "neat ice kit" which does that for ice cubes for drinking, but the results are very mixed. I've always wondered why it's a top down design instead of a bottom up? It seems to me like if you were to freeze a container bottom up, the impurities would be pushed out towards the top, and eventually out of the water into the air above, instead of making bulging shapes as ice expands and wasting half your ice with trapped impurities. I should test the theory later at home.
- somacert 8y agoMainly mechanical Top down you can put the the water in a small ice chest and the insulation will slow the freeze in the bulk. otherwise it freezes outside in That ice floats may play some role, I am not sure if for or against. I made a couple of attempts, just for fun, and found the ice chest necessary but never made a systematic study of the process.
- gpm 8y ago
- aylmao 8y agoTangential note that I thought was interesting: I have an eye condition called Keratoconus. It developed mostly on one eye before I had a procedure done to stop it from progressing, but my vision on that one eye is affected permanently. People tend to wonder why I don't wear glasses, and I tell them it's because they don't really help since I don't "blurry", I see "smudged". It's as if you took a picture with a camera with long exposure and moved it, but not quite. The pictures taken with this lens are a surprisingly good approximation of how I see with that one eye (perhaps sans the whitewash).
- frostburg 8y agoYou probably already know about this (especially since you likely had cross-linking done), but your vision might be helped by a custom scleral lens (they're unfortunately somewhat expensive).
- aylmao 8y agoThanks for the tip, though yeah I have (: Fortunately, the brain is magical. It's mostly one eye that saw progression before my cross-linking-- the other one sees pretty clearly, so my brain has gotten used to it and I guess stitches things in a way that means most of the time I don't really notice it at all. If I close the good eye, or focus on high-contrast, fine-detail things the effect will be clear, but I can thankfully go on my day to day without much hassle. Few people will see this but I'll mention it for good measure. If you notice your glasses aren't quite right, or you need a new (especially if it's a very asymmetrical) graduation often, make sure to see an ophthalmologist. The earlier you detect keratoconus the earlier you can stop it from progressing-- I'm certainly lucky I caught it before both eyes were really affected.
- nness 8y agoI'm also a keratoconus patient; post DALK. This was exactly my thought, too. These photos accurately represent what its like to see without correction at a later stage in the progression of the disease (albeit quite a bit clearer, but the irregular distortion, halos and ghosting is certainly present)
- runxel 8y agoI am somehow disappointed that the lens was actually just "your average lens size", and not really ... an iceberg infront of a camera. I don't know what I expected.
- doctorRetro 8y agoYeah, the title is a bit click-baity. I too was expecting some interesting experimental imagery where an entire iceberg was used as a lens, either literally or metaphorically.
- trumped 8y ago> I too was expecting some interesting experimental imagery where an entire iceberg was used as a lens, it says made from an iceberg... as in from part of an iceberg... do you know how big an iceberg is?
- jacobush 8y agoI thought it might be something similar to the neutrino detector. Where they somehow used an iceberg to deflect and focus some kind of radiation. The actual article was obviously in a very different direction but cool too in its own right.
- doctorRetro 8y agoExactly! It'd be different if the heading said "A Camera Lens Made from a Part of an Iceberg". But as it stands, I went in hopeful that an entire 'berg would be used in some creative or ingenious way.
- keithnz 8y agolikewise... I first thought... an iceberg? what?.... clicked through and was pffffft and the saw the blurry pics and was most un impressed. But now my expectations have sunk like the titanic I'm going, ok, that's pretty cool.
- 8y ago
- quickthrower2 8y agoI wasn't expecting the video to be so professionally made. Before I watched I thought "prepare myself for grainy, shakey video", then as I started watching I was thinking "he must have a go pro" and then "hell this is good" and finally "ah OK seem like he is a professional video guy"
- SiempreViernes 8y agoAnd artist, a video guy likely wouldn't have hastened climate change for the sake of poetic cred.
- whatshisface 8y ago>a video guy likely wouldn't have hastened climate change I know that it's a fallacy to say that one person isn't enough to make a difference, but I think taking a lens sized chunk of ice off a multi-acre glacier is, really, not making a difference.
- noir_lord 8y agoUnless he swam he probably flew to Iceland, which I suspect might be what GP meant by hasten.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoo_o ... I can't really think of a less generous interpretation, but still coherent, of my comment than that. I was of course referring to the fact that for a handful of clear ice he travelled 3000 km, contributing to climate change to visit one of the natural objects that exact behaviour is rapidly exterminating.
- mirimir 8y agoSeriously? Pinhole lenses can do lots better: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130436300@N07/44672960900 https://www.flickr.com/photos/130436300@N07/44672960900
- fudged71 8y agoBeautiful video! I love the idea of an ephemeral camera: custom made parts for a specific time and a specific place.
- hilbert42 8y agoHa, how wonderfully cute (can't say I'd have ever thought of doing it). All he needs to do now is turn it into a multistage lens with multiple elements and invent a melt-proof quarter-wave like coating to correct the aberrations. :-) Apropos the lens museum, I've great difficulty in chucking out lenses that no longer fit any camera that I now own. To me, lenses are precision instruments and its their 'exactness' I don't want to see escape off into a world of higher entropy.