While DSLR’s are staking a claim to be the camera system of the future, Civan is whisking his 5D into the past by mounting on it a 1908 “Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand cranked cinema camera lens.”
Found by a Russian lens technician from NYC, Civan describes the process:
My Russian Lens technician is a mad scientist and he took what sounded like an angle grinder to the lens to make its clear the flange distance and the mirror……. This lens’ value is unclear. its sort of on loan. It’s the only lens of its kind on a 5D
Originally, Civan was looking for some type of process that would help him achieve a vintage look for a project. As revealed in the pictures, he certainly found it. The lens provides incredible sharpness while maintaining a nice soft rolloff and the slight vignetting on the edge helps as well. Here are a few pictures taken with the lens straight from the camera:
Head on over to the cinema5D forum to read Civan’s post or to his website to see more.
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From the lenses of the past to the ones of the future: A few days ago Adobe showcased it’s plenoptic lens technology that – after some software tinkering – allows a user to choose what part of the image is in focus even after the picture has been taken. Sounds crazy, huh?
This amazing capability is possible through hundreds of tiny lenses placed between the actual camera lens and it’s image sensor. Those tiny lenses makeup the plenoptic lens.
This is the plenoptic lens. It is placed between the rear element of the camera lens and the image sensor
What this allows is hundreds of fragmented pieces of the image to be taken at once with the light rays fragmented and providing different information through each individual lens. When coupled with some software that can read this mountain of fragmented data, a user can manipulate the focus after-the-fact with a seemingly infinite depth of field.
The image before the software is applied
Software applied to focus on the background
Software applied, this time to focus on the girl in the foreground
Don’t get too excited yet, however, as like with any awesomely cool technology it’s a ways away from being placed in consumer hands. The possibilities are exciting, however. And while this technology was applied to still photography, with the way DSLR’s are beginning to push further into Cinema territory, by the time these plenoptic lenses have been perfected we may see the focus puller become someone sitting in an editing bay.
Head on over to Laptop to see more pictures, diagrams and a video of the presentation.
It would be amazing, I think, to control focus much in the same way those guys at Pixar would as a plane in a three-dimensional computer environment. It’s tough to say what Adobe’s new software will bring, but it’s nice to know that even while someone is pushing the boundaries, guys like Civan are holding tight onto nostalgic pieces of history.