Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Well it’s back to the drawing board.  My “lets see what we get and go from there” attitude didn’t pay off with much of a result to start.  There was just too much light leaking in.  So it’s going to require a major redesign with some baffles and better sealing around the lens board.  Some other modifications I’ll make is better tension of the film and a better film mask so that I can get more exposures from a single roll.

Here is the result and if you consider this is the best that I was able to get, by far, you can see that I need to do a lot more work.

Here is the original post when optimism was high. Lego Camera

I’ve been thinking about this for years but I finally took the time to build a medium format LEGO camera.  What made the effort all the more desirable was that I was recently given the perfect lens for the project, A Schneider Kreuznach Angulon 65 f6.8.  It’s hard to say how wide this will end up being but the negative is about 9 Lego bricks wide so it should be about the equivalent of a 28mm on a 35mm film camera.  Lego is not inherently light tight, every seam is a light leak, so I used some black paper inside to keep that down.  The lens board was held in place by some light sealing material, otherwise known as tape, and elastics.  This provided for a “very accurate” focus mechanism provided you have your eyes closed.  There actually was no focus I had previously ground a small piece of glass and used it to roughly determine that the lens board should be about 67mm from the film for infinity focus.  If your getting the sense that I’m not really sure of the results then your right.  I will send the film off and wait a week just to find out if it worked and how badly the light leaked.  I hope I’m pleasantly surprised but if I keep my expectations low then it will be easier to exceed them.