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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get it, none of these pictures look particularly mind blowing for all that hassle.

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.

I have a wide angle lens, and if I recall correctly, getting the background to blur is harder for the short focal length.

This one is very wide and still blurs the background.

(who knows, it might not be anything out of the ordinary)

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!

I think it's more to do that his shots are not very good. Some photographers have more exciting pictures than others.

This lens would be much better suited to nature and panaramic shots. Portrait shots not so much.

On the contrary, portrait is about the only thing you can do effectively with this lens.

Since it doesn’t have a flat plane of focus, you can never get any more than a small portion of the picture in focus.

You could maybe do a shot with only a single tree in focus, or something, but not a regular landscape.

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.

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