Earlier today I was drooling over the Red camera. They are freaking HOTT. They look like some cross between a mad max car and a space satellite. The story I heard was that the guy who started Oakley sunglasses basically said something to the effect of, “The sunglasses were just a way for me to build up enough money to make awesome cameras.”
The cameras look really great and have got some amazing optics and are basically everything I’ve been craving in a camera. The Scarlet, even though it’s the smallest one, looks completely wonderful.
On the flipside, over on Steve’s blog, I found this contraption. I’ve seen a few of these kinds of things around, but this is the cleanest one yet. What they do is make a lightbox kinda thing so that you turn the lens into a slide viewer with a fast old school photography lens and then you throw a macro lens on a video camera and point it at the screen on your viewer and you’ve got an effect that you can really only get with really nice and big 35mm film cameras… well, and now probably, the Red.
Fifty People, One Question: Restored from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.
This set up allows for a very thin focal plane so that only a few inches will be in focus. The thing that I like about this video is that even though the focusing effect is a major player in the video, instead of distracting us from the people, it serves the message and brings us closer to the people who are the subjects in the video.
I made a bunch of franken-cameras for shooting stills, but never made a video franken-camera. I’m going to put this one on my todo list!
I just happened to pen a post in a forum on this particular topic. The contraption you’re interested in is a 35mm Depth of Field Adapter.
After all the help and inspiration for making stuff I’ve received through your work, I hope this helps you out some. The info is intended for a crowd using a high speed camera but the examples are from rigs similar to what you posted from Steve’s blog.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1015&message=29385288
hmmm… just incase it didn’t come off right (and I’m assuming it didn’t because I’m writing this:) The first sentence was an attempt at a joke, you clearly know what you’re talking about. You are after all Bre Pettis the DIY Guy.
First part joke haha, second part real…ahem.
I wish that by the end of the day that I would be 100th of as cool as you are.
[...] ___ Hat tip: Bre Pettis. [...]