
DIY Apodization Filter - brudgers
http://www.4photos.de/camera-diy/Apodization-Filter.html
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eternauta3k
To those like me who are not into photography, this is equivalent to
multiplying by a sinc or gaussian before a Fourier transform, to avoid
artifacts caused by sharp windows.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apodization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apodization)

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anfractuosity
Nice, I'd never heard of this technique before to create 'smoother' bokeh.

Although I have seen some examples of people cutting a shape in card and
placing in front of the lens, to create different shaped bokeh, like hearts
etc.

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CarVac
This works best in lenses that have zero vignetting, like the purpose-designed
Minolta/Sony 135 STF and the new FE-mount 100 STF.

By comparison, the Fuji 56/1.2R and the Laowa 105/2 with apodization filters
lose the effect in the corners where the vignetting cuts off the soft edge of
the blur circle.

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amelius
Is there a shop where one can buy lenses, lense tubes, and filters relatively
cheaply? And by cheaply I mean under $50 for a lens.

I want to experiment with building a custom digital camera for robotics
purposes, starting from an image sensor. The quality of the image need not be
very high (comparable to a webcam), but the customized lens should allow me to
achieve things like magnification and specific focal depth.

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twic
You could try looking into C-mount CCTV camera lenses. C-mount is an old
standard that is still widely used for technical gear (or at least was back
when i was doing microscopy), and is used in (some) CCTV cameras, so there are
plenty of cheap but practical lenses for it.

I came across it because at one point, there was a vogue for using these
lenses with an adaptor on Micro 4/3 cameras. The idea was that you'd just
dropped getting on for a thousand pounds on a camera body, so couldn't afford
a lens, so you'd buy some thirty quid lens from China and use that. Needless
to say, it didn't take people long to realise that was really stupid.

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tesseract
> I came across it because at one point, there was a vogue for using these
> lenses with an adaptor on Micro 4/3 cameras. The idea was that you'd just
> dropped getting on for a thousand pounds on a camera body, so couldn't
> afford a lens, so you'd buy some thirty quid lens from China and use that.
> Needless to say, it didn't take people long to realise that was really
> stupid.

I think people were also attracted to adapting those lenses because there are
readily available CCTV and machine-vision lenses which are, compared to
typical photographic lenses, extremely fast (like f/1.0 and lower). This is
for applications like security cameras which need to be able to work in dim
lighting conditions, or machine vision applications that require a very short
shutter speed. Of course what the Micro 4/3 crowd eventually came to realize
is that in order to achieve a fast lens at a modest price point, those lenses
trade off other qualities like resolution and distortion, which are less
important in their intended applications, but seriously compromise the lens
for photography.

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mrob
I'd like to see lenses with the opposite trade-off: slow (ie. diffraction
limited) but excellent optical properties. They'd be ideal for outdoor and
long exposure deep focus shots, and it should be possible to make them smaller
and lighter than normal lenses. But these lenses seem not to exist despite
their potential utility. People focus on low f-number just because it's easy
to measure, and assume everybody wants blurred backgrounds.

Is there any source for high quality slow lenses?

