It's not even the algorithms themselves, it's human behaviour and the magic "engagement" metric.
Of course, it's also a self-reinforcing thing; there's articles telling people to put reaction faces on their preview images to increase engagement, there's articles telling people to use jump cuts, enthousiastic / shouty voices, certain microphone / camera setups, etc. Thousands of "do this ONE TRICK to boost your engagement on youtube by 0.34%" kind of articles and tutorials, trying to cargo cult aspiring video makers into doing the same thing that some of the top youtubers do.
I'll stick to my series of disembodied hamhands and Scottish space nerds, thank you.
I hate the jump cuts. It's just distracting when a sentence has been spliced together from four or five takes (or maybe just two which they alternate between).
It's as distracting. And hard to follow. As it would be. To read a sentence. That has had full stops added. All over the place. Like this.
Why does everyone feel the need to screw with scrolling (the avclub link scrolls much faster and weirder than the Firefox Android default)? It's disorienting.
I don't get it. Where is the spec? What's the aperture size, focal length of this beast? What about abberations? How does it work in extreme conditions that a normal lens can't take a good image?
So many questions, but the author decided to use it to take portraits in day light ...
Ken Rockwell might be the most interesting reviewer I've come across in years. What he favours is well known (e.g. metal over plastic) but his opinions always feel honest and he's pretty pragmatic on what he recommends. Unlike most reviewers (across all review subjects) he provides a lot of technical data to the point where it feels like it's "ok" to form a different opinion from him, and that you don't have to write off his whole review. He doesn't tend to get stuck on one fault with a lens like many people do.
And his website is easy to read and navigate, which is rare for review sites.
Ken's site is great. I don't like his photographs and I often disagree with his opinions on gear, but he's very consistent and knowledgable. I always check to see if he has a review before I buy a new lens or body, especially if it's film.
Maybe I'm too distracted by the formatting of the website. I find his pages to contain ridiculously large size photos that make the article hard to read. No tables or organization of information in a consistent way (or across lenses, cameras) that makes comparisons or reading easy. Very hard to tell if he's actually expert at something or his credibility. All of his observations are just qualitative (as is any typical amateur enthusiast camera website).
I much prefer DPreview.com's reviews of cameras and lenses.
Years ago I got a bit into photography, and I got a cheap M42 lens adapter after I picked up a Pentacon 135 2.8 [1] - for only £8! It's a great lens, and while I'm not a tech expert, it just has a really different look to any of the standard Canon-fit lenses I have. It looks a bit like the images in the imax, and it's not just that it has shallow DoF because of the aperture (I have a sigma 35 that goes down to 1.4). If I wanted a 'vintage' look to a photo, I'd use it, and it's great having a large aperture lens for very little money that you can see in action as it's manual.
Hmm, I don't think you want the IMAX projector lens, you want the IMAX camera lens. I don't think it works exactly "backwards" where a lens designed for the limited purpose of projecting onto a known static plane is what is best to actually acquire the images (?)!
It does work, but you are right that the optimization is definitely different.
I think imax lenses are easily 5-6 figures unfortunately.
Edit: It was a lens apparently, wow.
It doesn't look like any of the IMAX lenses I can find online!
The camera lens wouldn't produce the fisheye effect which they seem to enjoy. I don't think the camera lens would be any different to a high-end still photograph lens. Using a projector lens is the novelty here.
There is a vibrant community of people experimenting with old vintage lenses. Mirrorless full frame camera's are relatively easy to make/get adapters for. See Mathieu Stern for inspiration. [1]
Agreed. Also I thought IMAX shot 70mm film which means by using it on a 35mm camera he's only using a small fraction of the image circle.
A wide angle lens actually designed for 35mm would perform better if so.
What he did is sadly a good tactic to get publicity/followers though, which in the photography world directly translates to more customers and revenue.
Depth of field increases as the focal length decreases. It's exceptional enough that there are very involved manual procedures for taking 10-20-30 pictures with a telephoto lens wide open, and stitching them together to give a wider angle appearing picture.
Completely spit balling, but I suspect that front lens element is worth about as much as a house.
I agree that it was disappointing, but I give him an A for effort. Even though the idea didn’t really work out, I thought the video had some interesting information, like the part about building a custom mount, having to change a setting to enable photos without a lens, and the lighting.
The comments on this post are more negative than I expected.
I really enjoyed this guy’s enthusiasm and his “guerrilla” setup. It’s easy to criticize his method, but he went out and shot some skaters with a big weird lens!
It's a fun if janky build, and he's using the "wrong lens for that" distortion as an analog framing effect. Not mind-blowing, just some curiosity and follow-through.
> It almost has a tilt shift kind of quality like it’s you’re focusing on one point.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that knows anything about cameras that if you don't have the lens lined up properly you'll get a tilt-shift effect. This is basically a rig that does controlled "lens whacking", where you don't mount the lens but you hold it freely to let light bleed through the mount and mess up the focal plane (https://philipbloom.net/blog/the-art-of-lens-whacking-real-l...)
I bet if the lens was mounted properly it would look... like a normal wide angle lens.
It’s obviously a project made for fun. And you are asking the guy to shell out $10,000 for a new camera body?
Edit: of course, renting is an option. But personally even with insurance I would not be comfortable with the risk of renting such expensive equipment for a project that was purely for my own entertainment/curiosity.
On his "front page" (latest mentioned video) he is talking about a lense called "BOKEH" and my mind immediately went to the movie "Bokeh" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3722062/) which is a great Drama/Sci-fi film, and a standing glorifying ad of Iceland's eerie and majestic scenery/landscapes. If you like sci-fi, give find it
there is nothing compelling in this experiment, for anyone who has prosumer-level understanding of photography
the lens was designed for a film format with much larger surface dimension. The lens' image circle is likewise large - much larger than the sensor in the camera this guy used.
The digital sensor will simply be overlayed with a cropped portion of the full image circle projected by this lens.
I quite like that format, it looks like a youtube video, but unrolled.
I much prefer this than watching a whole video. Less bandwidth, less ads, I can skip to the part I want, the content' doesn't keep going on while I want to re-read something or examine a picture, while it is light on processing power.
I disagree. His utter inability in video, and the necessary still-photographer kludge that results, are glaring and obnoxious. And, in this awful, disjointed slide show, he manages to make the same mistake YouTube makers make, time wasted on trivial, semi-irrelevant “making,” here, the woodworking part.
Which I've happily scrolled over while I reached parts that were more relevant (to me). It isn't that easy to do in a video, here I saw at a glance that the section was going to be uninteresting, and if there had been interesting tidbits, I wouldn't have had to sit waiting for him to finish drilling in between.
Well, at least, I got a simple answer to the question the title prompted me: "how does it look". I got baited, but didn't have to sit trough it.
(the answer is "not bad, a lot of depth of field, that lens is bigger than I imagined, and the resulting quality doesn't seem to be worth it).
OK, to be fair, I had missed the "lens" part, and was really curious.
The idea is interesting but as a side note, why does every web site try to ask me to sign up for their newsletter as I'm moving to close the tab? Why did this trigger/event end up in browser spec? Biggest anti-feature ever.
Depth of field effects caused by long focal length lenses (preferred in portraiture for this reason), called "bokeh". In this case the light is coming into front lens elements, and it doesn't appear to be corrected for distortion, and then not uniformly focused onto the surface of the camera's sensor. Potentially this was for a Imax dome.
So, no, this doesn't have anything to do with smart phones.
In ye' olde times, induced background blur would have been a gaussian blur in software. I'm not sure what special magic they do today. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05698 suggests things have moved on.
Didn't Photoshop release a feature in the past couple years that does exactly this? Simulated depth of field? And I remember watching the demo video and it looked damn good. Plus there's that Lytro camera that also allows you to move the point of focus around in the picture in post-processing.
[0]: https://emulsive.org/articles/building-a-naked-aero-ektar-sp...
[1]: https://www.flickr.com/groups/aeroektar/pool/