I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it

https://thelibre.news/i-made-the-next-level-camera-and-i-love-it/

by ndr • 3 months ago

258 73 3 months ago

PaulHoule• 3 months ago

This lens

https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05

is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands.

Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like

https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/

which again are a great value and let me take pictures you haven't seen before.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm

fennecfoxy• 3 months ago

Manual focus I keep for film, I feel like it's a part of the process.

But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.

zimpenfish• 3 months ago

I've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens.

I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)

(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)

hdndjsbbs2• 3 months ago

Worth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.

walrus01• 3 months ago

There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.

germinalphrase• 3 months ago

Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.

pnathan2• 3 months ago

I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.

atombender• 3 months ago

Laowa (aka Venus Optics) makes a range of excellent macro lenses, too. I use the 65mm f/2.8 2x macro with my Fujifilm cameras, and supposedly it improves on even Fujifilm's famous 80mm macro in sharpness.

Another fun, small one is the Korean brand Samyang (also sold as Rokinon, Bower, and some other names). Their 12mm f/2.0 manual wide angle is excellent despite being quite cheap. Photos I take with it often get a unique look that I can't really explain.

thenthenthen• 3 months ago

I think next-level would be a hypercentric lens that can see around / behind objects as build buy Applied Science: https://youtu.be/iJ4yL6kaV1A?si=QG7YfeXkOqzoK46O

NooneAtAll3• 3 months ago

what if I want the opposite effect?

I hate blur, how do I remove all of it?

4gotunameagain2• 3 months ago

pinhole camera and an insane amount of light.

Or, multiple exposures and HDR.

nimbleal• 3 months ago

Not sure how multiple exposures helps?

Smaller sensor, tighter aperture. So yes, more light or a more sensitive sensor.

dbspin• 3 months ago

Shoot at a higher fstop with a sensor with a high native ISO, like 12,800.

adzm• 3 months ago

The trade off is so much noise

CarVac• 3 months ago

Focus stacking.

a012• 3 months ago

Shoot at f/64

atroon• 3 months ago

There was a whole group of people who did this, apparently.

pnathan2• 3 months ago

Shoot at high f numbers - as high as the lens will take without inducing diffraction.

wao0uuno7• 3 months ago

Shoot with smaller sensors and step down your lens. The bigger the sensor the shallower the depth of field at given f-stop. For example when shooting with an APS-C camera at f2.8 you're going to get the same amount of light on the sensor but less background blur than when shooting on a "full frame" camera at the same f-stop. So if stepping down the lens is not an option because there's not enough light you can still get a little bit less background separation and blur when shooting with APS-C or MFT cameras. Also the wider the lens the less background separation you get. 135mm lens at f2.8 is going to have razor thin depth of field while a wide angle 28mm is going to get way more in focus. Also hyperfocal distance. With wide angle lenses you can get pretty much everything from few meters away all the way to infinity in focus at the same time. That's why (I think) all phone lenses are wide angle.

barrenko• 3 months ago

Get a nikon j1/v1.

IshKebab• 3 months ago

Now, here's the kicker:

Come on now.

foldr6• 3 months ago

And, the combination of wide-angle-view and super-high-aperture would literally require light to pass through the metal of the camera in order to reach the sensor:

This isn’t necessarily true when using a retrofocus wideangle design (as most modern ultrawide lenses do).

arijun3• 3 months ago

Doesn’t that remove the narrow depth of focus the author is going for?

foldr6• 3 months ago

No. Depth of field is determined by aperture and focal length. Whether or not a lens has a retrofocus design isn’t relevant.

niccolove10• 3 months ago

To be honest, if that's not the part where physics fail, it's going to be the actual production of the lenses... Either way, there's no such lens available to the market.

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

Could also combine with the "scanner back" and not have the intermediary screen you have to photograph.

Of course everything has to remain quite still…

Next level indeed: https://youtu.be/KSvjJGbFCws

niccolove10• 3 months ago

This is an option I wanted to experiment with, but when I decided to use it for the short film it died off in my mind. (I even checked how many fps we'd get with a scanner...)

bambax• 3 months ago

multiple scenes that specifically required a very thin depth of field

The images at the end of the post are indeed amazing, but I find it funny that we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.

For most of the history of moving pictures, cinema had the exact opposite problem: it looked for the deepest depth-of-field possible in order to make every part of the image count and not waste it to blurriness.

It's a weird reversal of expectations.

Retr0id• 3 months ago

we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning

It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example.

And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.

Lerc• 3 months ago

The harder to achieve has prestige due to rarity. When the rarity goes away the prestige makes whatever the item was highly popular before the prestige fades. Then the older form becomes more rare and valued by some, in a manner not quite the same as prestige but as a sort of decerning choice.

White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.

miladyincontrol• 3 months ago

The advances of modern AF and focus pulling systems truly has led to a world of consequences in amateur and even professional film making. In a world where anyone can take half decent video with the phone they always have, its a sign of "I have dedicated hardware to have taken this". The chase for toneh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g

Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare.

Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.

jtbayly• 3 months ago

Isn't it also related to wanting images to appear how we would see them in person? Our eyes blur everything we aren't looking at directly, don't they?

niccolove10• 3 months ago

To be honest, the aperture of our eyes is so small that, yeah, we do blur background, but nowhere an near as most lenses do.

hdndjsbbs2• 3 months ago

Technically the images look great, very impressive. Production-wise I can also see how this could be useful for low-budget interior dialogue scenes where you don't want the set dressing to distract. It really draws focus to the actors and lets the director paint a more impressionistic backdrop.

The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.

niccolove10• 3 months ago

we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.

Nicco here. I didn't use a shallow depth of field here for either reason. I wanted it because all of those scenes are memories of years ago compared to the main events. Thus, I wanted to give the feeling of details blurring out as memories fade. By contrast, I shot the main events at ~f8 on the Helios, so the background is quite sharp.

bensyverson2• 3 months ago

Nicco, I'm here to peer pressure you into shooting 8x10 sheet film. :)

You're gonna love it.

kouru225• 3 months ago

It’s annoying because it’s scarcity for scarcity’s sake. The reality is that low depth of field cameras constrict the actors and make them unable to perform naturally. Blocking out the background is also just hyper-convenience for the audience IMO: you’re telling them exactly where to look. It’s visual handholding.

The only reason why people think this is valuable is that it’s scarce, and scarcity is a terrible metric for art

tsunamifury• 3 months ago

This photographer seems to be chasing the Alec Soth look which can be had with a large format camera and a scanner back.

https://www.mcad.edu/events/visiting-artist-lecture-alec-sot...

brucedawson• 3 months ago

Unfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Having "not" reverse the meaning of the critical sentence!

pixelpoet2• 3 months ago

They also keep saying definitively instead of definitely :)

niccolove10• 3 months ago

Sorry, I promise I'll spend more time spell checking my articles from now on.

wao0uuno7• 3 months ago

Bro discovered large format cameras. Yeah I didn't read the whole thing.

Edit: Some examples: https://sandyphimester.com This really is nothing new.

niccolove10• 3 months ago

Well, obviously large format cameras are nothing new. The point here is: for these kind of apertures and wide angles we need a super large area to expose, and usually either (a) they're smaller with digital cameras, or (b) they use film and thus cannot record videos. This is specifically the approach that uses a depth of field adapter to be able to record videos on these, which is also not new (I provided references at the end of the article), but it is quite rare! Also, each design of there depth of field adapters is quite different and I think it's interesting to see the differences between them all.

wao0uuno7• 3 months ago

I guess it's pretty interesting for video but still not sure about calling it next-level. This look is as old as photography itself.

throwanem• 3 months ago

Are none of the images meant to load on mobile? I have to assume not, since without them I can't make sense of the article.

vile_wretch• 3 months ago

Sony uses a particularly narrow lens mount. A wider aperture would be easier with Canon RF or Nikon Z mounts (Nikon Z having the widest throat diameter and the shortest flange distance among full frame cameras).

shen• 3 months ago

Because the e mount was designed for apsc that they brute forced into making compatible with full frame.

hencq• 3 months ago

What a great writeup! I really enjoyed reading the whole process and problem solving approach. This is why I come to Hacker news.

hyperific• 3 months ago

Interesting that he explored wax as an interstitial "image sensor" medium. Given the low melting point of wax you would risk part of your camera melting during hot days, or the wax gradually settling on the bottom from heating and cooling cycles.

Kudos to him for exploring it though! The leftover wax could supply a small candle making operation.

buildbot• 3 months ago

Sensors this large do exist! https://www.servethehome.com/stmicroelectronics-makes-a-18k-...

There’s also (maybe) http://largesense.com

lytfyre• 3 months ago

that STMicroelectronics is 8.31cm by 9.92cm. That's _massive_ by digital sensor terms, but still pretty far off the 42cm by 29cm OP's effectively using.

Tepix• 3 months ago

From TFA:

My camera sensor size is 35mm by 24mm. Multiplied by 12, we get 420mm by 288mm. That's, uh, 42cm by 29cm. It's, like, pretty big. That's the size of a painting you'd hang on your wall. This gives us two issues:
Firstly, such a sensor simply doesn't exist. …

The Vera Rubins telescope camera has a diameter of 64cm!

<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vera-rubin-observatory-d...>

echoangle• 3 months ago

That’s not a single CCD though. That’s an array of multiple smaller sensors that are next to each other, but there will be gaps where they meet. They take multiple pictures and combine them to make a regular image of the sky, something you probably can’t really do for photography (or videography of course).

mcdeltat• 3 months ago

This thing is amazing. The kind of nasty extreme optics I love to see. Good stuff! The final images are pretty gorgeous. I'd love to shoot on this thing

webrot• 3 months ago

Wow this is pretty cool. I loved the images at the end!

I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it

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