102 Year-Old Lens on Canon 5D MkII

Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?

Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:

He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”

The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.

But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.

102 year old lens on a 5DmkII [Cinema 5D forums]

via feeds.wired.com

Partly to test this new "Share to..." feature in Google Reader, partly because it's a thing I desperately want.

Big Rig

Haven't bothered trying to get this close to the rig until now, but my engineer dad wanted to get a better look.

Big Rig

Haven't bothered trying to get this close to the rig until now, but my engineer dad wanted to get a better look.

Now playing

I wanted to try and describe this band myself, but their poster does a better job than I ever could.

This guy is far too excited about his new DVD player.

Alien vs Hunter

These names are getting more ridiculous, I think. Although this one probably isn't much worse than the "real" one...

I think I'm going to regret this...

Doesn't look all that scary to me

Project: MyWorld

The thing I've been working on for the last three years has finally been announced! We can talk about it, at last!

What would it look like if Nintendo built Google Earth?

Project: MyWorld turns the real world into a fun 3D social gaming experience. Project: MyWorld is a virtual recreation of the real world combined with 3D gaming and social media.

It is the next-generation of social gaming.

Digital Economy Bill: The Reply

After waiting five days for a reply to my last email, I forwarded it to Stewart Hosie's main email address, as well as the SNP HQ email address.

Within a couple of hours, I'd recieved this reply from Kevin, the same assistant who'd replied to my previous missives. The yellow highighting around "PEGI" is his, not mine; I'm still not 100% sure why it's there.

Dear Paul

Further to our recent correspondence, Stewart has advised that, whilst he agrees there was a lack of scrutiny to the bill, he believed that the need for PEGI to become the classification system for video games overcame his concerns regarding scrutiny and the other sections of the bill.

He appreciates that you may be personally disappointed but his decision was one he did give careful consideration to.

Yours

Kevin

This rang hollow to me; after all, the BBFC and PEGI already rate pretty much every game released in the UK, and rushing through a bill with the kind of security and civil rights implications of the #debill just to formalise that situation seems extreme to me, so I sent this short message back - and have yet to recieve a reply.

Kevin,

Thanks for the reply - I was just hoping to get a little bit more information from you about Stewart's decision.

Given that video games are already certified by the BBFC in some cases and PEGI in all others, what benefit does rushing through the Digital Economy Bill have? I don't see how waiting a couple of months with the system we have - which is perfectly functional and enforcable - is such a terrible prospect that the civil liberties of voters need to be put at risk from legislation that has not been given proper scrutiny and consideration.

I don't understand how the serious concerns about the bill expressed by internet companies, security agencies and your constituents are deemed less important by Stewart than the rushed official implementation of a ratings system that is actually already more or less in place.

I'm looking forward to your reply.

Thanks,

-Paul

Hopefully I'll get a reply, but honestly I'm not expecting much.

The Digital Economy Bill

Last night, the House of Commons passed the controversial Digital Economy Bill. For more information on why this bill is a useless piece of garbage, see here and a million other places online.

Immediately after the debate, shortly before midnight, I sent an email to my MP, the SNP's Stewart Hosie, asking how he'd voted. I got a reply from one of his assistants this morning saying they'd look into it and get back to me.

I found the answer myself, before they got back to me, so I sent this to them as well.

Hi Kevin,

I already know, thanks to Hansard (link), that Mr. Hosie voted in favour of the Digital Economy bill, which only really leaves one question outstanding:

Is it the official policy of the SNP to disregard the impact of wide-reaching and unscrutinized legislation on your constituents' civil liberties, in order to appease corporate lobbyists, or is that only the case for this bill? Did Mr. Hosie not read or understand the bill and its implications for free speech and communication, or did he simply not care? He obviously didn't feel strongly enough about the bill's contents to participate in the debate beforehand, despite being in the House of Commons for the finance debate that took place immediately before it.

Dundee prides itself on its thriving digital businesses; games companies like Denki, Realtime Worlds, Tag Games, Ruffian and Proper Games; Abertay and Dundee University's focus on computing and new media courses; the city's participation in the Fibre City Project, and of course the massive publishing and content creator that is DC Thomson. How can Mr. Hosie, who claims to represent many of the people who work for these companies and institutions, justify not standing up to say a single word during the Digital Economy Bill's debate?

Given the controversy surrounding this bill, and the massive impact it could - and very likely will have - on the future of communication in this country, it was essential that the whole House be allowed to scrutinize the whole bill before it was passed. Instead, the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches colluded to have the bill forced through in the wash-up, bypassing the democratic process and cheating their constituents out of their rights. I am horrified that my MP and the rest of the SNP went along with this cheap sham.

Leaving aside the grave implications this bill has for the health of Britain's digital economy, the freedom of speech and the sharing of information, this is a severe precedent set for the future of democracy in the UK.

Yours,

Paul Cosgrove

Go beyond the web

From the excellent Savage Chickens.

Ohai

The most interesting thing I've been up to lately: I've made (and released) an app for the Palm Pre. It's a search app for the Wizards.com D&D 4e Compendium (if that doesn't mean anything to you, then you might as well skip the rest of this entry), which I put together for two reasons:

1. I wanted to learn how to use Ajax and multi-scene apps in the SDK, and
2. I wanted this app for myself

The second one is probably the bigger impetus; with any other phone or device, I'd probably have waited for someone else to (never) make what I wanted, but this is the first time I've been in a position to do it myself so I figured I should probably take the opportunity.

These screenshots are actually significantly out of date; I've just finished the first pass on my second round of features, so it does a ton more now than it did when it went online last week. I'm hoping to test it more thoroughly over tomorrow and during a D&D game on Wednesday night.

I've done some minimal promotion, on the D&D forums and Twitter, and at the time of writing it's been downloaded 89 times, which is way better than I could ever have hoped. If anybody reading this has a Palm Pre or Pixi (or if you know someone who does!), you can download it here - although if you wait til the weekend, the newer version will hopefully be available then.

This is actually the second app I've written for the phone, but the first will never see the light of day for fear that I will be sued into oblivion for copyright infringement.

In other news: work is good; the Christmas holidays were over far too soon; we finally got a comfortable computer chair.

News From The Front

From Kate Beaton's fantastic Hark, A Vagrant.

The Intelligence Squared Debate: Stephen Fry

The Intelligence² Debate - Stephen Fry (Unedited)
by Xrunner17

This speech is utterly astounding.

It makes me want to hug him.