A new line of Chinese pictorial lenses!

[Uri A]

Mark, this is the coolest thread I have ever seen. Kudos!

[Vaughn]

Since you re-opened this thread...

Alex, Last Game of the Season
Speed graphic w/ magnifying glass lens
Type 55
Scan of a contact print

[Uri A]

Beautiful, Vaughn.

Type 55... seriously, isn't there SOME factory in China that can make this happen goddammit ?!?!?!

[Mark Sawyer]

A few more weeks, and a new crop of students will be at them again...

[Vaughn]

Beautiful, Vaughn.

Type 55... seriously, isn't there SOME factory in China that can make this happen goddammit ?!?!?!

If a Chinese businessman had been on his toes, he would have bought the whole factory and shipped it to China...maybe that would have worked.

The beauty of the material was due to the (rumored) Kodak Panatomic X used for the negative in the Polaroid product. The magic was in the monobath goop in the chemical pod. The engineering was getting it all together in one package!

Mark -- good to hear that! Have fun!


Another:
Alex at Bat -- and getting a hit in the last game of the season
Scanned contact print.

[Tim Meisburger]

I already posted this in the portrait thread, but saw this old thread referenced in another thread, and decided to revive it. I remembered this thread, so while I was at my mothers in Tucson for the holidays with nothing to do, I went out to the garage and made a linhof board out of a piece of plywood, cut a hole in it and glued on a four inch length of cardboard shipping tube, then used clear caulk to mount a magnifying glass lens I bought at the 99 cent store inside. I cut a slot in the top and made some waterhouse stops out of cardboard, then spray painted the whole thing black. Yielded a 7 1/2" f2.7 meniscus.

Here is the first shot. My little sister at the dining room table, wide open.

[goamules]

Good one Tim! I'll be sending you your plate and such tomorrow, from the workshop.

[AtlantaTerry]

This is a very interesting thread. I've been using small magnifying glass lenses taped to the front of a Nikon bellows on my 35mm cameras since the '70s for pictorial and soft focus portraits. I also have a couple very rare Sima SF lenses (one element + Waterhouse stops) in a T-mount.

So with my interest of many years in using magnifying glass lenses to make soft focus photos, I would like to extend this thread one step more: adding a shutter to the 2F99c lens to use in daylight on my Cambo or Crown Graphic cameras.

My first thought would be to mount the magnifying glass element on the back of a lens board and mount a shutter on the front in the traditional manner. The shutter will probably extend behind the lens board to some extent so we will have to move the lens element back a bit in order to give the shutter some clearance.

How to move it back easily? Hmmm... how about looking in the plumbing area of a hardware store where they have black PVC pipes of all sorts and sizes. Then use hot glue to affix the plumbing piece to the back of the lens board. We then attach the shutter in the normal way to the board.

Question: will it make much of a difference if the shutter is far from the lens element?

What size shutter will be best for a project like this? I'm certainly not going to use the Copal 3 shutter from one of my best lenses. But I might have some smaller shutters around here. I'm sure in one of my storage boxes I have a shutter from a Polaroid MP3 copy camera or another shutter with no lens in it.

Suggestions?

[Mark Sawyer]

Question: will it make much of a difference if the shutter is far from the lens element?

What size shutter will be best for a project like this? I'm certainly not going to use the Copal 3 shutter from one of my best lenses. But I might have some smaller shutters around here. I'm sure in one of my storage boxes I have a shutter from a Polaroid MP3 copy camera or another shutter with no lens in it.

Suggestions?

The only difference the shutter-to-lens difference will make is in mechanical vignetting. As the Copal 3 has a 58mm thread front and rear, I'd consider blowing the big bucks for a set of 58mm close-up diopters, and screw them in at the rear. +1 is 1000mm, +2 is 500mm, +3 is 333mm, +4 is 250mm. A nice set of meniscus soft focus lenses that fit your shutter for under $20!

Example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/58mm-macro-c...item27b146e032

But you can hunt around and find them even cheaper, I bet!

[AtlantaTerry]

Mark, good suggestions. But, once again, I am not going to take apart my best lens just go get to the Copal 3 shutter.

What I will do is see what empty shutter I have around here then see about attaching a close-up diopter to it.