29 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] thread
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

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.

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.)

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.
(comment deleted)
I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.
(comment deleted)
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.

what if I want the opposite effect?

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

> Now, here's the kicker:

Come on now.

> 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).

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

> 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.

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

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...>

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