If you can trust anyone to come up with a great camera hack, it’s a research engineer from SFX superstar Industrial Light and Magic. And luckily for us, that engineer, aka Bhautik Joshi, spends his spare moments putting together things like the Fisheye Tin Cam, a fisheye lens in a soda can.
The whole project is dirt cheap, even with a few new parts on the shopping list. The lens is based around one of those super wide-angle security peep-holes found in doors ($6 new) coupled with a single-element film-projector lens ($3 at a yard sale) to corral the 180-degree fisheye image into a form acceptable to the camera.
An adapter ($9 on Ebay) to actually mount the unit to the body is the only other photo-specialist item, and then the whole shebang is stuffed inside a soda can and held in place with hand-cut foam donuts. The result is ugly as hell, but the pictures it makes are just the opposite.
Bhautik took his new creation out for a spin in San Francisco’s Mission District, and you can see the results on his Flickr page. The v1.0 Tin Cam has some room for adjustment (the projector lens has a thread for focussing), but the point of this is the weird colors, the distortion and the general lo-fi vibe you can’t get with even the fanciest digital effects. The irony of this, considering Bhautik’s job, doesn’t escape us.
The fisheye tin cam [Cow Mooh via Photojojo]
Post a Comment