They Ain't Bitin'

Well, that didn't work.

Not entirely unexpected, but my home-grown fisheye lens didn't work. In fact, it alarmed the manager at Walgreens, who expressed genuine concern over the state of my camera. The lens swap threw it hopelessly out of focus. So that experiment... not so successful. Lesson learned: just because the focal length looks the same doesn't mean that it is the same.

But, there are some positives, like me gaining a better understanding of the workings of Chinese-made plastic cameras (they are all pretty much the same design inside) and finding some fairly ninja-esque directions for completely tricking out this model of camera. Thanks to those, I learned how to keep the shutter open, and use a piece of tape to check the focus. This isn't the easiest thing to see, but this is the landscape outside my window, projected (upside down) onto a piece of tape:



(In retrospect, I should have done this first, since it would have shown that no combination of lenses projects a clear image except the originals.)

So those hoping for clever fisheye photos (me, *sob*) stand down, and watch for more experiments in the future...