SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The unarguable benefits of digital photography has rendered the analog SLR obsolete for most purposes. This means that a wide selection of cameras and lenses are available on the second hand market for pennies on the dollar, making them ripe targets for hacking. [drtonis] decided to experiment with a quick and easy digital conversion to an old Canon A-1, and it’s got us excited about the possibilities.
It’s a simple hack, but a fun one. The SLR is opened up, and the spring plate for holding the film is removed. A Raspberry Pi camera then has its original lens removed, and is placed inside the film compartment. It’s held in with electrical tape, upon a 3mm shim to space it correctly to work with the original optics.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 17 2019, @05:45AM (2 children)
Looks like he just tapes the original shutter and mirror out of the way, and sticks the Raspberry Pi where the film would go. So it's really just a light-tight box with a mount to hold a lens on front. You can't even use the original viewfinder anymore because the mirror is in the way, and you're not using the camera's shutter either. I'm also not sure how he's controlling the aperture in the lens either, maybe the A-1 has a DOF preview function. A more interesting hack would be to use a SLR with a mirror lockup feature (I don't know if the A-1 has that), so that you can flip the mirror down and look through the viewfinder, then flip the mirror up to take your picture.
Of course, he could accomplish the same thing without the SLR. Just build a light-tight box with the camera sensor inside of it, that can mount the lens out front. I did something like that back in the analog days when I had access to a darkroom. I cut a hole into a black plastic VHS cassette box that I could mount a lens on, and inside the cassette box I could tape a piece of positive photo paper to the back. Seal it up all good, and I now had a camera. Photo paper is pretty slow - something like ISO 6, so I could use the lens cap as the shutter and a tripod was mandatory. Of course, it was a single shot only and it was back to the darkroom to develop the image. It obviously wasn't super useful but it was a fun little project.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:37AM (1 child)
Like an RPi camera, you mean?
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 17 2019, @07:33PM
Exactly, though I might consider just getting a sensor so I wouldn't have to tear apart a RPI camera, though I assume the RPI camera is cheap and interfacing to it is easy.