Home Brewed Lens Workshop

[Joe Taylor]

This past year I have built a machine shop out in my garage with all the toys-- CNC and pedestal lathe. End mills. Surface grinders-- the works. Mainly to make and trick out my own camera parts. With my new cnc lathe, I have started making and re-mounting vintage lens mounts to work on PL and Canon mounted systems. Find old and INTERESTING lenses can be a challenge.

Here is a real find but sort of pricey: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPER-FARRO...era_Lenses&hash=item415c861b3c#ht_1103wt_1075

Anybody know much about this lens?

 

[Mitch Gross]

I think we're all more interested in hearing what kind of home brew stuff you've been cooking up!

 

[Dave Blackham]

Red's cameras are great and continue to to push boundaries and offer all manner of new opportunities at each twist and turn. The one factor that remains a real revolution in its own right is the ease to use all manner of lenses on the cameras due to flexible lens mount systems available.

Id be interested to know more about that homebrew optics your creating ?

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Yeah, post a full rundown of your shop, pics, what you're doing, etc! If you would, that would be pretty badass

 

[Travis Moulton]

If you don't mind sharing, I think we all would love to hear more about what you're up to in your garage!

 

[Maxi Claudio]

Hi Joe!

That's an area I wanted to get into. More on the lower end of machine equipment, but certainly to be able to machine lens parts, work with aluminum for cages would be great. And I have a surplus metal warehouse near me. All the Aluminum you want for about $2 a pound. Just need a way to work with it. I have extensive woodworking experience.

Let us see your set-up.

Thanks

Max

 

[Joe Taylor]

Some folks have requested some custom lens work. I have to say upfront that ALL that I have done thus far has been personal mods to inexpensive vintage brass view camera lenses I've had in my collection and what I can find on eBay. My brother-in-law is the real expert and is the one who got me started with some mods he made to a set of 1930's era Cooke Panchros that he modified for his Aaton 35-3. Much of what I do is trial by error. There is no way I will try and modify any expensive or rare lens. To me that is almost sacrilege.

I will, however, by happy to share what I've accomplished with a few brass view camera lenses. The most interesting being the non-destructive modification to a 1840's Voighlander daguerreotype lens that I made with a turned brass extension tube threaded to a cheap PL adapter.

I'm working in Needles till Sunday. Will post some pics of my work when I return!

 

[Jacek Zakowicz]

Excellent idea Joe. There is a real shortage of craftsmen in our industry. Shops are closing. So sad to see it die..... Pick your brothers brain on the conversions- there is a good market for them IMO...

 

[Zack Birlew]

I just wonder how you could mount this thing. I'm excited enough for the Noktor 50mm 0.95 possibly getting a Nikon/Canon mount, but this thing would be a beast for sure, especially at 6lbs! Reading up on it, it would have to be on some sort of push/pull or screwmount to work since that's how it focuses(???). I'm pretty interested to see what the results would be whether on a RED or full frame DSLR.

 

[Jacek Zakowicz]

get the Canon 85mm f1.2 and the results will be ten times better at the fraction of the price....

 

[Dan Kanes]

@optitek - would you be interested in converting an Olympus OM 50mm 1.4 and possibly some other olympus OM lenses to PL mount?

They don't need to be fully rehoused - just PL mounted, and a gear for focus would be awesome...

The Iris ring is more towards the front, so if you were to mill the back off you wouldn't need to re-attach the iris control with some funky system (I think)

 

[Maxi Claudio]

Seeing that a lot of the machine now is CNC rather than craftsman using calipers and carefully adjusting axis. Is the PL mount itself easily available as a CAD file so, we'd have an accurate starting point building an adapter.

I had the idea of putting ND filters inside an adapter. Rather than larger expensive glass in front of the lens. Like a flip out door.

 

[Joe Taylor]

I'm with you all the way on this one Maxi. CNC is one of the reasons I left the machine trade-- it's boring. That, and filmmaking had its everlasting calling. Unless he is a true master and highly sought-after at his craft, there really is no paying jobs for the old school machinist. Everything is CNC, which makes sense if you're going to produce multiple items. To me machining is simply a hobby that goes very much hand-in-hand with filmmaking-- just like astronomy-- or even collecting 1st editions of all my favorite works.

And to answer your question, I'm sure that CAD file is out there somewhere, but it would probably just as easy to splurge the $150 and buy you a mount since nobody is going to release their blueprints.

A PL adapter is the perfect example of why CNC tooling makes so much sense. There would be hours-upon-hours of work just to make one if you were to do it the old fashioned way. A CNC setup could spit out the mount from blank to finished product in a half-hour max.

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Here is a real find but sort of pricey: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPER-FARRO...era_Lenses&hash=item415c861b3c#ht_1103wt_1075

Anybody know much about this lens?

Here is one for $675,

http://www.astromart.com/classifieds/details.asp?classified_id=337507

It T/1.0 so about 2/3 stop faster than most f/1.2 lenses, perhaps.

There is a company that still sells "new" ones, some are marked "made in Germany".

They come up from time to time, I was going to get one for our filmrecorder to speed up shooting, but its probably a bit soft.

There are various versions of the 76mm it seems that focus at various distances, so if you get the close focus one, you might need a weak negative element in front to focus deeper and that could add softness.

Also using a lens faster than f/2.0 on the OLPF makes the "plate effect" worse, the rays at the side take a longer path through the glass plate than the rays at the center of the ray cone and add negative spherical aberation.

If you want to shoot under low light, using static camera and temporal noise reduction may give sharper results than ultra speed lenses.

I don't know if Panavision mounted these for their T/1.0 lens, for a lens to be T/1.0 it needs an f/ of about 0.87 anyway. The company that makes these is in New York.

It would be better on Epic at 5K since the sensor area is larger.

I can't find the link to Farrand Optical now because the archived REDUSER files have the URLs abbreviated, they did list several focal lengths and versions of the Super Farrand.

==

I enjoy desigining lenses on the computer when I get bored sometimes, the other day I got a nice result for a 5 element design that had clean results up to 300lp/mm.

I have a book written by one of the lens grinders who worked at Dallmeyer in England written before WWII about how to make your own photographic lenses at home as a hobby. I have a 1930 f/0.99 one inch in C mount, maybe he made that one also.

Today its possable to make good lenses at home, but the coating would be another issue as it might add too much cost. I wish I would have 10 more life times so I could do all the things I hoped to before I check out, but grinding lenses may have to be something I need to put asside for this life time... If you want to do it though, I might be able to give you a few "pointers" as the book I have tells all the details including how to build the needed glass working machine tools etc.

 

[Steven Veldkamp]

This lens has a back focus of 15mm. it covers a 40mm image circle. More than enough for a Red i assume.
The lens was put in focus by screwing it back and forth.

There's another one on Ebay right now, but the front element appears to have major coating problems. (look closely for the purple spots)

 

[Maxi Claudio]

So, when can we see some of your shop? I'm going to start some Aluminum milling for my rig.

 

[Shane Kelly]

If you are working with view camera lenses, you should build something like this, the horseman ts pro from bandpro:

For fun, I adapted one from a bronica medium format bellows a while back and it gives really cool results.