Mobile Macrographer
New Toy
I read somewhere that you can make a telescope using the lens found in a photocopy machine (with pretty amazing results). Of course, my next thought was could I make a macro lens out of it?
The other picture shows the unassembled lens and what a beast it is! The whole thing must weigh at least 3 kg! The lens you see me holding in this picture is almost 1 kg and only one component of the whole thing.
After some trial and error, taking things apart and putting it back together, I managed to get a 'working' macro/telephoto lens. A very different set up to my usual DIY lenses and it's going to be an exciting challenge perfecting this one. The lens you see in the picture comprises of 4 lenses in total, 1 flat, 1 concave and 2 convex.
Putting the lens directly in front of my phone camera produces only ok results, nothing that blew my mind or was any different than the lenses I already have. It did provide with greater depth of field than the other lenses I have made, which is a bonus, but strapping this lens to my phone will be pretty useless and counterproductive as it weighs so much. I still had to be around 2-5 cm close to the subject to produce usable results.
However, when I held the lens 5-10 cm away from the phone camera something unexpected happened. In this picture, the lens was around 15-20cm away from the dragonfly and 10cm from my phone. I manually focused onto the lens and it produced the result you see in this picture.
My guess at this moment is Ill need to make some type of tubing/casing to hold the different lenses together after deconstructing it, as it seems to produce the best result when the lens is a certain distance from my phone. Of course with my phone, the sensor has a fixed aperture of f1.8 which makes everything that bit more complex. And then theres the issue of mounting the thing!
If you have any ideas please feel free to share :). Hopefully the end product will be a decent macro/telephoto lens which allows me to be 15-30cm away from the subject rather than 1-5cm (which is what im getting from the current lenses I have).
New Toy
I read somewhere that you can make a telescope using the lens found in a photocopy machine (with pretty amazing results). Of course, my next thought was could I make a macro lens out of it?
The other picture shows the unassembled lens and what a beast it is! The whole thing must weigh at least 3 kg! The lens you see me holding in this picture is almost 1 kg and only one component of the whole thing.
After some trial and error, taking things apart and putting it back together, I managed to get a 'working' macro/telephoto lens. A very different set up to my usual DIY lenses and it's going to be an exciting challenge perfecting this one. The lens you see in the picture comprises of 4 lenses in total, 1 flat, 1 concave and 2 convex.
Putting the lens directly in front of my phone camera produces only ok results, nothing that blew my mind or was any different than the lenses I already have. It did provide with greater depth of field than the other lenses I have made, which is a bonus, but strapping this lens to my phone will be pretty useless and counterproductive as it weighs so much. I still had to be around 2-5 cm close to the subject to produce usable results.
However, when I held the lens 5-10 cm away from the phone camera something unexpected happened. In this picture, the lens was around 15-20cm away from the dragonfly and 10cm from my phone. I manually focused onto the lens and it produced the result you see in this picture.
My guess at this moment is Ill need to make some type of tubing/casing to hold the different lenses together after deconstructing it, as it seems to produce the best result when the lens is a certain distance from my phone. Of course with my phone, the sensor has a fixed aperture of f1.8 which makes everything that bit more complex. And then theres the issue of mounting the thing!
If you have any ideas please feel free to share :). Hopefully the end product will be a decent macro/telephoto lens which allows me to be 15-30cm away from the subject rather than 1-5cm (which is what im getting from the current lenses I have).