Liquid lens

[monkeymon]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Rare-Liquid-Lens...3A1%7C294%3A50

Well how about that? Someone buy it and lets see some photos with it!

Anyone experimented on liquid lenses? I tried ones, just by filling a sphere shaped bottle with water.. only shot one frame, didn't have a proper way to fasten it to a lensboard. I think something like purified gasoline or lighter fluid would be better than water anyway.

After the experiment, i googled and found one water lens.. it was made of two half sphere elements with the air space filled with water.



Sutton's Patent Panoramic Water Lens, 1859

[Peter K]

Well how about that? Someone buy it and lets see some photos with it!

Without the oil it's a Petzval lens.

Kingslake mentioned Dr Grün's lens as a joke.

[Walter Calahan]

Very cool.

[Mark Woods]

Fill it with KY Jelly (un-flavored and un-colored). It is optically clear and it's water soluble.

[goamules]

Or fill it with napalm jelly, and stick a fuse in it....

[Sevo]

The Sutton's Panoramic in your picture was a truly new design with spectacular properties at its time (at 125° coverage it is quite a wide wide angle even by modern standards), and even though its issues meant that it never became a success, it pioneered wide angle design as a whole.

Dr. Grüns "invention" on the other hand is a mere gimmick, a fourty year younger variation on a already severely outdated design (and a stupid one at that - its critics claimed that the dry lens outperformed the liquid filled one).