Vintage Lens - Tumblr Posts

Otterbein Rd. Kitchener, Ontario Canada. 24/09/08. D.e.D.


Macrophotography of a corroded faucet naturally forming a bubble and drips.
Shot through an 8-element Takumar 50mm f1.4 lens with a 27mm extension tube on a Pentax K-3.

The Light Also Blossoms
Modern(ish) DSLR and antique lens.


Revised 3d-printed lens board for my large format lens from 1850. It is a big chonker for a lens that only covers 4x5, but it has been a pleasure working to get it back into image-making after more than a century out of service.
Lots of challenges remain when trying this for image making. This lens pre-dates even waterhouse stops, so has a fixed aperture of about f3.7 (which is enormous and super fast in large format terms), and has no built in shutter.
I still don't have a serviceable shutter for it, so to get into image-making sooner without wasting film, I'm trying out direct cyanotype photography. The image below is my first attempt: a 4.5-hour exposure on paper treated a month or so before the attempt. This image is inverted from the original blue paper negative. This was a poor choice of subject for such a long exposure (there are flowers here, many concealed by the deteriorated chemistry) as they moved in the wind.

I'm working on modifying a 1950's vintage electric Packard-style shutter into something Arduino-controlled so I don't have to have the camera plugged into the wall and rely on super old wiring. When I have a functional shutter, I should be able to find some low-sensitivity film (ISO 10 or less) to take some regular film photos.

Wildlife encounter at the Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs.
Pentax K-3 with SMC-A* 300/4 lens.