Hasta La Gadget!

What do you do if you drop a camera lens on the sidewalk and hear the sickening crack as the glass elements break into useless crystal fragments? If you’re me, you stand there, crying, until a passerby comes to give you a reassuring hug. If you are tough-guy Pat Joyce, from St. Albans in the UK, you suck it up and make a fisheye lens.

Admittedly, Pat didn’t actually break his own lens. He picked up a pre-broken Sigma 28-200 from the camera store in nearby Watford for £5 ($8). He took an unbroken element and added a short tube to keep the lens at the right distance from the front of his camera, a compact Canon Ixus 65. This in turn was flipped into macro mode to take the shots.

The pictures are surprisingly good, and the lens pulls in a huge field of view, just like a real fisheye — you can see the whole gallery of Pat’s pictures and even a time-lapse video over on Flickr. Thus, we learn a lesson. If you break something, don’t stand there blubbing like a stupid little baby. Instead, take the parts and get hacking.

Cheap Fisheye [Flickr via DIY Photography]

Photos: Pat Joyce/Flickr