5 ms·

86 years old lens hacked onto 5DMKII

86 points by rainboiboi 15y ago

gbaygon 15y ago
Not to sound cliché, but that old lens takes the warmest picures i've seen.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  It's hard to say what's part of the lens and what's part of the postprocessing - notice that the pictures of the lens/camera itself is quite warm also. May just be the author's style.
- Arelius 15y ago
  Agreed, but not surprising... calling a nice modern lens "warm" would be nearly an insult. Modern lenses generally prioritize accuracy to warmth, and appropriately so. It is however a little sad that there is such a small market for more stylistic lenses.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    There is a reasonable size market, but a vast supply of old lenses so making new ones not very profitable...
  - dllu 15y ago
    It is perhaps sad from a nostalgic standpoint, but otherwise it is quite possible to closely approximate all characteristics of an old lens just by post-processing an image taken with an accurate modern lens (e.g. the Hipstamatic app), so it is little wonder that the market for old, stylistic lenses is so small.
    - wisty 15y ago
      I used to have a mobile phone which could take "warm" photos. It could also do "alien vision", and a couple of other neat tricks. People said it was cheesy. You can also attach some APS-C lenses to a Full Frame, and get "romantic" vignetting. If you do that in Photoshop, it's fake. The "creamiest" bokeh you can get is a gaussian blur, unless they know it's photoshopped and then it's no longer "creamy". There's some kind of emotional response people have to optical distortions which they don't have if they know it's from post-processing.
- miahi 15y ago
  That lens was never created for color photography. The warm tones probably have advantages on the B/W film.
  - stefanoric 15y ago
    The lens was just probably not color-corrected. Early BW films were mostly sensitive to the blue and green side of the spectrum. Only later did they become more sensitive to the entire visible spectrum (including the red zone, which we consider warmer). They were called panchromatic films (as opposed to earlier orthochromatic films).
nullflux 15y ago
The sharpness surprised me. What a beautiful combination of new and old.
- justincormack 15y ago
  Old lenses are often sharper in the centre of the field than modern ones, but much less sharp nearer the edges. Trade offs in design, overall sharpness is what people want now.
  - dfischer 15y ago
    What's the limitation that causes this?
    - dllu 15y ago
      Lenses can be less sharp around the edges for a number of reasons: - Chromatic aberrations. Most old lenses are not achromat or apochromat, so different wavelengths of light get refracted with different indices of refraction. In black-and-white photography, the colour fringes near the edges simply show up as being slightly blurry, so it's not as big of a deal as in modern colour photography. - The plane of focus might not in fact planar, but may be curved due to the lens having a simple optical design with few elements. So when one focuses on the centre of the frame, the edges of the scene do not coincide with the plane of focus. As for the claim that old lenses are sharper than modern lenses in the centre... perhaps it is true when comparing that lens to compact camera lenses and the such. But from my casual perusal of DSLR lens benchmarks, modern prime lenses are very, very sharp in the center and should certainly beat this lens - especially when stopped down. Modern DSLR prime lenses are often faster than f/2 wide open, whereas that old lens is f/6.8, yielding a deeper depth of field. But stopping the modern lens down to f/6.8 should result in superior resolution. Anyway, small cameras and cell phones can be less sharp due to diffraction effects on such a small scale.
      - cytzol 15y ago
        Thank you for posting this. I still think of lenses as just a tuple of (focal length, f-number), and can't understand why two lenses of the same "spec" can be different. Probably a bad mode of thinking to be in.
brico 15y ago
I first saw pictures made by Timur Civan with a similar technique and an even older lens: http://colt-rane.com/timur-civan-1908-wollensak-35mm-f50-cine-velostigmat-lens-102-year-old-lens-on-a-5dmkii/ http://colt-rane.com/timur-civan-1908-wollensak-35mm-f50-cin...
hcarvalhoalves 15y ago
An absurd ammount of flare... but the camera looks awesome with the Frankenstein in front of it. As a side note: I use a lens from the early 50's in my Pentax DSLR - without hacks - and it produces beautiful portraits. Amazing how optics were already damn good back then.

86 points by rainboiboi 15y ago

gbaygon 15y ago

Not to sound cliché, but that old lens takes the warmest picures i've seen.

potatolicious 15y ago
It's hard to say what's part of the lens and what's part of the postprocessing - notice that the pictures of the lens/camera itself is quite warm also. May just be the author's style.
Arelius 15y ago
Agreed, but not surprising... calling a nice modern lens "warm" would be nearly an insult. Modern lenses generally prioritize accuracy to warmth, and appropriately so. It is however a little sad that there is such a small market for more stylistic lenses.
- justincormack 15y ago
  There is a reasonable size market, but a vast supply of old lenses so making new ones not very profitable...
- dllu 15y ago
  It is perhaps sad from a nostalgic standpoint, but otherwise it is quite possible to closely approximate all characteristics of an old lens just by post-processing an image taken with an accurate modern lens (e.g. the Hipstamatic app), so it is little wonder that the market for old, stylistic lenses is so small.
  - wisty 15y ago
    I used to have a mobile phone which could take "warm" photos. It could also do "alien vision", and a couple of other neat tricks. People said it was cheesy. You can also attach some APS-C lenses to a Full Frame, and get "romantic" vignetting. If you do that in Photoshop, it's fake. The "creamiest" bokeh you can get is a gaussian blur, unless they know it's photoshopped and then it's no longer "creamy". There's some kind of emotional response people have to optical distortions which they don't have if they know it's from post-processing.
miahi 15y ago
That lens was never created for color photography. The warm tones probably have advantages on the B/W film.
- stefanoric 15y ago
  The lens was just probably not color-corrected. Early BW films were mostly sensitive to the blue and green side of the spectrum. Only later did they become more sensitive to the entire visible spectrum (including the red zone, which we consider warmer). They were called panchromatic films (as opposed to earlier orthochromatic films).

nullflux 15y ago

The sharpness surprised me. What a beautiful combination of new and old.

justincormack 15y ago
Old lenses are often sharper in the centre of the field than modern ones, but much less sharp nearer the edges. Trade offs in design, overall sharpness is what people want now.
- dfischer 15y ago
  What's the limitation that causes this?
  - dllu 15y ago
    Lenses can be less sharp around the edges for a number of reasons: - Chromatic aberrations. Most old lenses are not achromat or apochromat, so different wavelengths of light get refracted with different indices of refraction. In black-and-white photography, the colour fringes near the edges simply show up as being slightly blurry, so it's not as big of a deal as in modern colour photography. - The plane of focus might not in fact planar, but may be curved due to the lens having a simple optical design with few elements. So when one focuses on the centre of the frame, the edges of the scene do not coincide with the plane of focus. As for the claim that old lenses are sharper than modern lenses in the centre... perhaps it is true when comparing that lens to compact camera lenses and the such. But from my casual perusal of DSLR lens benchmarks, modern prime lenses are very, very sharp in the center and should certainly beat this lens - especially when stopped down. Modern DSLR prime lenses are often faster than f/2 wide open, whereas that old lens is f/6.8, yielding a deeper depth of field. But stopping the modern lens down to f/6.8 should result in superior resolution. Anyway, small cameras and cell phones can be less sharp due to diffraction effects on such a small scale.
    - cytzol 15y ago
      Thank you for posting this. I still think of lenses as just a tuple of (focal length, f-number), and can't understand why two lenses of the same "spec" can be different. Probably a bad mode of thinking to be in.

brico 15y ago

I first saw pictures made by Timur Civan with a similar technique and an even older lens: http://colt-rane.com/timur-civan-1908-wollensak-35mm-f50-cine-velostigmat-lens-102-year-old-lens-on-a-5dmkii/ http://colt-rane.com/timur-civan-1908-wollensak-35mm-f50-cin...

hcarvalhoalves 15y ago

An absurd ammount of flare... but the camera looks awesome with the Frankenstein in front of it. As a side note: I use a lens from the early 50's in my Pentax DSLR - without hacks - and it produces beautiful portraits. Amazing how optics were already damn good back then.