Guy needs one of these...

[Jack Harrison]

...if he has £100 grand to spare.



http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/ ... -50007748/

I really love the specifications, especially this mix of Imperial (now called American I believe) units and Metric:

The massive glass dome on the front of the lens is a quarter of a metre wide, sticks out 6 inches, and weighs 5kg...

I can't Fathom that one. Maybe I missed the Chain of Links earlier in the spec. But at that price, surely they should be quoting the weight in Troy units
(Troy weight is a system of units of mass customarily used for precious metals, gemstones, and black powder) and tell us how many Carats it is?

.....or something like that.

Think what Guy could do with one of these - would suit his style perfectly.

This is NOT April 1st.

Jack

[Padfield]

'Wide angle' fails to do justice to this lens, which captures a picture angle of 220° ... That means that light striking the glass from up to 20° behind the plane of the lens gets redirected to the sensor! To achieve that without huge chromatic aberration seems an amazing feat of optical engineering to me - hence the price, presumably.

Guy

[Jack Harrison]

Alternative idea. Get three cheap 12 mp cameras for under £50 each, use as a bank set at 60 degrees angle apart and you have a 180 degree panoramic camera.

It would need some sort of mounting, exposure trigger would need to be synchronised and the same exposure on all three. Appropriate stitching software would make equivalent a 36 mp camera with horizontal angle of view just over 180 degrees, vertical of 50 degrees. Appropriate banks of cameras could be used for different panoramic angles.

Must be a bit cheaper than £100 grand and think of all those megapixels

Space Agencies such as NASA do something similar with banks of 9, 12, etc cameras.

Jack

[MikeOxon]

Alternatively, get something like the Opteka fish-eye converter - £30 from Amazon. They attach to virtually any camera that has a filter-ring around the lens and produce a similar full-circle view. I used one on my Canon A630 compact to take whole-sky views during a total solar eclipse, as shown on my website at http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/eclipse.htm. Here's one taken at Seven Barrow reserve, Berks, with the attachment on a Nikon 18 - 70 lens:

Seven Barrows, Lambourn - 4th June 2008
Nikon D70 with Panagor fisheye - 1/90s@f/19 ISO400

Mike

[Jack Harrison]

I am thinking of setting up a sky (weather) web cam using an old camera. Image quality wouldn't really be an issue for its intended purpose. The Opteka fish-eye converter might fit the bill.

Am I correct in thinking it can simply be screwed (with a suitable adaptor of course) into the filter thread?

Jack

[MikeOxon]

Am I correct in thinking it can simply be screwed (with a suitable adaptor of course) into the filter thread?

Mine, which is branded 'Panagor', has a Series VII thread, with which I use an adapter ring to the appropriate lens filter thread. I assume that the Opteka version is similar but have not examined one. The adapter is an afocal converter, so should work with any lens that has a wide enough angle of view (typically, a 28mm lens on 35mm frame) to 'see' the whole circle. Providing the main lens is well stopped down, quality is surprisingly good with mine. It's quite fun just to hold the thing up to your eye and look through it!

If you look closely at my Seven Barrows shot,there is a butterfly in the foreground!

Mike

[ScottD]

iirc it actually sold quite quickly - I think that it went to a collector in the USA.