Focusish

(Subtitle: "Hey Ted, that was kind of brilliant")

So, this happened tonight:



Thanks to a cheapy body cap, some short work with power tools (ooh, power tools) and an old set of macro-photography bellows that I inherited, I bring you operation "Great googly moogly, this might actually work." The bellows adjust for the long focal length of the lens perfectly.

The lens is just resting inside the hollowed-out cap at the moment, since the threaded ring that held it to the board was too large to fit inside the new mount. I'm going to look at options for this -- maybe a rubber ring to friction-fit it into place, with some tape to be extra sure? I don't want this to be a permanent attachment. And I need to get into the shutter mechanism again to figure out how to get the "T" setting working again so it doesn't require four hands to operate.

Dang. I've almost finished something I started. I may have to walk away for a year or two just to pace myself.

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...

Something Fishy

Because of this... (from this Agfa)


...I did this.




Typed on "Lucky" the Remington Noiseless Model Seven

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