I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it
thelibre.news258 points by ndr 8 days ago
258 points by ndr 8 days 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
And keep in mind crop factor applies to aperture too! A 50mm f1 on M43 in equivalent to 100mm f2.
If you're thinking about the depth of field then yes. Exposure wise f1 is f1 no matter the sensor size.
I think that actually it applies to exposure too? Because a M43 sensor is going to be "half" the size of Full Frame, which means that the pixels will have 1/4 of the area, so you need 4 times the light to have the same amount of noise per pixel, i.e. two stops of light... but feel free to correct me here, I only have double checked the math on the depth of field part of it.
Yeah kinda. Amount of light per area is the same but smaller sensors have smaller pixels that have worse SNR. This means the sensor receives the same amount of light per area but still needs to boost the signal more because of smaller pixels. I believe that if a full frame camera and MFT camera with the same pixel pitch and lens existed it would get exactly the same SNR and exposure. So basically with smaller sensors DOF is increased, exposure remains the same, SNR gets worse.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Nicco, I'm here to peer pressure you into shooting 8x10 sheet film. :)
You're gonna love it.
Ah ah ah I totally should get into it! When time allows it :-)
It takes less time than building a camera! haha
Unless you find yourself building an open source rotary film processing system, which is a possibility we can't rule out. :)
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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...)
Sensors this large do exist! https://www.servethehome.com/stmicroelectronics-makes-a-18k-...
There’s also (maybe) http://largesense.com
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.
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
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...
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.
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!
They also keep saying definitively instead of definitely :)
Sorry, I promise I'll spend more time spell checking my articles from now on.
It's no problem really, and thanks for the great article! I'm actually simulating lenses at work right now so this is topical and very interesting.
Spellcheck wouldn't help here because definitively is also a word, just not the "write" one :)
> 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).
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.
Doesn’t that remove the narrow depth of focus the author is going for?
No. Depth of field is determined by aperture and focal length. Whether or not a lens has a retrofocus design isn’t relevant.
And sensor size. The bigger the sensor the shallower the DOF and better the perceived quality of blur at given f-stop.
It’s only the focal length and f-stop that affect depth of field. Sensor size affects it only indirectly, because you need a different focal length to get the same angle of view.
From an optical point of view, light does not bend differently just because you put a differently-sized rectangle somewhere in its path. Or to put it another way, if you cut the edges off your sensor, that won’t alter the image on the remaining area of the sensor.
Yeah I guess you're right but there are limits on how shallow your DOF can get on smaller sensors. So when it comes to practical irl results you kinda need a larger sensor to get extremely shallow DOF.
> there are limits on how shallow your DOF can get on smaller sensors.
Only in the sense that you generally use a smaller sensor because you want your camera to be small.
If you take a full frame SLR and attach a 100mm f1.8 lens to it, you’ll get a shallow depth of field. Now crop that image down to an area of the sensor corresponding to the size of a phone sensor, and the cropped image will have the exact same depth of field.
Did you read the article?
> Now, here's the kicker: the bigger the focusing lens is, the larger the cone of light rays is, meaning the the out of focus parts of the image will be more out of focus
From the page [0] it takes the depth of focus image from:
> [Depth of focus] differs from depth of field because it describes the distance over which light is focused at the camera's sensor, as opposed to the subject
[0] https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.h...
The first quote is clearly talking about depth of field, not depth of focus. See also what I quoted in my original comment.
Depth of focus isn’t really relevant to the rendering of an image (except insofar as you want your camera to be built to sufficient tolerances that a sharp image can be obtained when desired).
I assumed you were using “depth of focus” to mean “depth of field”. If you really meant “depth of focus”, then I would say you are mistaken in thinking that the author’s goal is to obtain a narrow depth of focus.
The first quote is definitely talking about depth of focus; the linked image talks about depth of focus and how it compares to depth of field. As I understand it, depth of focus has a similar effect to depth of field. If your rays diverge more quickly on the side of your sensor, you will have a blurrier image for the same distance from the focal plane. Otherwise, how do you think depth of focus presents itself in the final image?
Depth of focus doesn’t present itself in the final image. It’s generally irrelevant to practical photography from the point of vide of the photographer (as opposed to the camera designer or lens manufacturer). The first quote is talking about depth of field (i.e. how quickly focus falls off from the plane of perfect focus).
FWIW, here is what Claude has to say:
>> Is depth of focus, as opposed to depth of field, generally relevant to practical photography?
> Not really, no. Depth of focus and depth of field are related but distinct concepts, and for practical photography, depth of field is what matters almost all the time.
> Depth of field refers to the zone in front of the camera where subjects appear acceptably sharp. This is what photographers think about constantly: choosing apertures to blur backgrounds in portraits, stopping down for landscapes to keep everything sharp, figuring out hyperfocal distance, etc.
> Depth of focus refers to the tolerance zone behind the lens, at the image plane (the sensor or film), within which the image remains acceptably sharp. It tells you how precisely the sensor needs to be positioned relative to the lens for focus to be maintained.
> For the overwhelming majority of photographers, depth of focus is invisible because it's a manufacturing and engineering concern, not a shooting concern. Camera makers deal with it when designing bodies and ensuring sensor flatness, lens mount tolerances, and autofocus calibration. You encounter it indirectly if you ever need to calibrate autofocus micro-adjustments, shim a lens, or diagnose back/front focus issues, but you don't actively manipulate it while composing a shot.
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).
Because the e mount was designed for apsc that they brute forced into making compatible with full frame.
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
What a great writeup! I really enjoyed reading the whole process and problem solving approach. This is why I come to Hacker news.
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.
Wow this is pretty cool. I loved the images at the end!
what if I want the opposite effect?
I hate blur, how do I remove all of it?
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.
pinhole camera and an insane amount of light.
Or, multiple exposures and HDR.
Not sure how multiple exposures helps?
Smaller sensor, tighter aperture. So yes, more light or a more sensitive sensor.
They must mean by creating a composite image with multiple in focus areas? Otherwise I agree, I can't see anyway that multiple exposures would help, at least from some light reading on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_exposure
Shoot at high f numbers - as high as the lens will take without inducing diffraction.
> Now, here's the kicker:
Come on now.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Bro discovered large format cameras. Yeah I didn't read the whole thing.
Edit: Some examples: https://sandyphimester.com This really is nothing new.
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.
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.
The title is a reference to diy perks, who has built the same camera and called it a "next-level" camera in its YouTube video. Thus, 'I built _the_ "next-level" camera' instead of a '_a_ "next-level"' camera :-)