Shot through your loupe

[Tim Meisburger]

So, you are deep in the Grand Canyon. The landscape and the evening light is spectacular, but as you hurry to mount your lens, fingers trembling with excitement, disaster happens! That fried chicken you ate made your fingers slippery, and you drop that lens and it smashes into a rock, breaking the front element, then bounces and hits another rock, breaking the rear lens. Unfortunately, your good friend, the one who convinced you to replace the front element of your PS45 with a Holga lens, also convinced you that real shooters use only one lens, and so you only have the--now useless--Holga mod. What will you do, what will you do...

Why, shoot through your loupe, of course. Mine is a 4x Calumet (Rodenstock), which turns out to be about a 70mm f/2.5. I wasn't in the Grand Canyon (okay, it was my backyard) but yesterday I removed the tube (because of vignetting) and duct taped the rest to a lens board and made a few exposures with a lens cap for a shutter. Fun stuff!

I would like to propose a contest. Shoot through your loupe and post here in the next ten days, then we will have a pollen the best shot, and the winner will an honorary MacGiver award, and one million dollars (if we can find a sponsor; PM me if you have the cash).

Here is my set up:


The lens wide open (about f/2.5)

Here it is stopped down to about f/32 with a piece of black construction paper and a small hole.

And here it is with the lens board turned around so you can see the duct tape mount.

[Tim Meisburger]

So, if you would like to participate, have at it. The only rule is you use the element from your loupe as your lens. Here are two I did as proof of concept:

At f/2.5. I taped a 3 stop neutral density filter over the lens to slow it down enough to use a lens cap shutter. Clearly I had some issues.

And here is one at f/32 with a Galli shutter, which didn't work too well due to the bed of the camera being in the way of the swing. I'll try to do another for the contest, but since I am out of 4x5 film (more on the way) I will have to shoot paper.

[Sheldon N]

Seascape...



Fuji 4x Professional Loupe
Kodak 2D 8x10

[Tim Meisburger]

Nice!

[Sheldon N]

There might be a couple details missing from how I shot it, but I think I followed the rules.

[Fr. Mark]

I will have to try this tomorrow. I may have some time in the morning or Sunday afternoon. I do use the zoom bits from a dead zoom lens as a loupe. Probably being too cheap...

[Tim Meisburger]

Well, I've run out of 4x5 film, so I cut up some paper and shot some paper negatives with my loupe yesterday. FL 70mm, f/8 at one second. Scan of a contact print. As you can see I have coverage issues, so I cropped it.