Image of a Camera

To make an image, all it takes is a lens. I feel it's a common misconception that camera lenses have to be on a body to make an image, but that's not true. A lens will always be projecting an image, a camera is just a way to capture the purest form of that image. 

One way you can see how this works is to take a camera lens off a camera, and put it it's focal distance away from a piece of paper under a lamp. The focal distance is the distance the lens focuses (dur..). When you have a bright light source above the lens (i.e. a lamp) an image of it will be projected through the lens onto the paper. It will be dim, since there is a lot of light pollution, but it is there, just a sharp as it would be in the camera. All the camera does is provide a light proof case for the sensor or film. 

Tonight, I had access to a large format camera lens. These lenses project  very very big image circle in order to cover the whole 4x5" negative. The image circle is the image projected by the lens. And not, they're not rectangles like pictures, they're circles. With small format cameras, the image circle does not need to be that big since the sensor or film is small. The larger the sensor though, the larger the image circle needs to be. 

So with a 4x5 lens, I projected an image that took up half a sheet of paper. Pretty dang cool and fun to do, since it looks just like a photograph. Except for that you can manipulate it in real time, and it's not on a little view finder. 

For my photo tonight, I projected an image of a light bulb. Somehow, I got the glowing filament in the middle of the bulb too. The dynamic range on this was just amazing. There's still details in the shadows on the bulb, but you can see the individual spirals on the filament. 

To get a more clear picture, I cut out a circle the diameter of the lens from a piece of mat board. This mat board served to block a lot of the light that was coming from the lamp and would interfere with the image. A more clear picture resulted. 

Taking a picture of this was a bit difficult. First, I had hand occupied with the lens to make the image, and then the other hand to manipulate the camera to image the image. Shooting at f/2.8 gives  shallow depth of field, so focusing was really difficult. It was hard to keep the lens in exactly the right place, so I had to focus and then quickly take the picture. Really, it just took a few tries. I shot at 1/13th and ISO100, which wasn't that bad. Little blurring of the image, but not terrible. 

Editing was quick and simple. Didn't want to modify it too much. I just converted to b/w, then upped the contrast a bit. Done! 

See you tomorrow!