Sunglasses ND Filter Hack

Posted by sean

A couple summers ago I took my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera to Door County, Wisconsin on vacation. To keep my setup super compact the only lens I brought along was my Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens, which was great until I realized that it was too bright out to shoot at f/8 and all my footage was overexposed. I didn’t have an ND filter with me but I soon realized there was another option: cheap sunglasses and tape! Check out this little tutorial video I made for Fotodiox showing how I used this hack to save my vacation video.

And here’s the video I shot.

Capturing Dreamy Photos with a Vintage Hit Camera Lens

Posted by sean

This winter I found this vintage Hit Camera at an antique store, a miniature camera you could buy out of the back of a comic book in the 1950’s!

The camera is designed to use miniature roll film which is no longer manufactured anywhere, so while I attempt to figure out how to make my own, I removed the camera’s lens and mounted it on my Sony A7S II via a hodgepodge of adapters and tape.

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Making a Magnifying Glass Lens

Posted by sean

I’ve always wondered what using a magnifying glass as a lens would look like, and this summer I decided to give it a try. I’ve seen people online hold a magnifying glass up to an exposed camera sensor or lens for trippy freelensing experiments, but I really wanted to see how close I could get to building an actual lens. The build was super simple: all I did was tape a magnifying glass to a macro tube and attach it to my camera. Here’s a tutorial video I made for my company, showing my process.

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