I Built the Next Level Camera

This is one of my favorite lenses, the Helios 44. It has an aperture of 29 mm, meaning that if you look straight through it, the circle that you see has a diameter of 29 mm. Why do we care, you might ask. Well, you probably know that pictures can be out of focus. But, why does autofocus exist? Well, without getting too technical, the lens takes the rays of light emitted by an object and then converges them into a single point. If you place the camera sensor in that point, you'll be able to see the object. However, if you place the sensor closer or further away from that point, then you'll get a circle and the image will be out of focus. Now, here's the kicker. The bigger the focusing fo- focusing, sorry, lens is, the larger the cone of light light rays is, meaning that the out-of-focus parts of the image will be more out of focus. This is partially why phone cameras can't naturally reach the same levels of background out-of-focus that cameras can reach. They have such small lenses and sensors. This is the camera lens that I do most of my work in. As you can see, this lens is much bigger. This is what I'm using right now. Indeed, its maximum aperture is more than 53 mm, almost double what the Helios can offer, which allows for a very strong separation between the subject and the background. So, the question is, how big can we go? How much blurriness can we get out of a lens? Well, assuming that we're okay with carrying a lot of weight, uh we can go pretty big. As an example, take the Sigma 135 mm f/1.4, this lovely lens, which I sadly don't own yet, has a majestic aperture of 96 mm and it can deliver pictures like this one. There's a catch, though. Due to physical constraints, all of these large lenses are also very like zoomed in. Take your phone camera and set the zoom to 4x, and that's roughly what you're going to get with this Sigma lens. This can be great for some scenarios, and it's my favorite focal length. But what if we want to keep to keep the same giant aperture but with a wider field of view as well? Well, we can't. The reason is remember the cone of light rays above? The bigger the lenses, the bigger the cone of light is, too. But also, the wider the field of view of a lens, the bigger the cone of light is, as well. And the combination of a wide-angle view and a super high aperture would literally require lights to pass through the metal of the camera in order to reach the sensor. >> [snorts] >> In order to work around this, you'd have to quite literally tear your camera apart in order to expose the sensor. Somebody has Stanley done it, sorry, namely some Stanley Kubrick guy. But and of course, by the way, the lovely folks at Media Division. There's a link in the article. But even so, Kubi Kubrick, how do you pronounce it? Kubrick only reached 71 mm of aperture, and that's still on a 50 mm focal length, which is still 2.7 times wider than the 135 mm as mentioned above, but also not exactly a wide-angle lens, either. Media Division instead went for 136 mm of aperture, but on a focal length of 100 mm, which is awfully close to the 135 mm. Also, I am not taking my camera apart. And finally, all of these solutions require these giant piece of lenses that are extremely rare and also very pricey. Luckily, there is a solution to all of these problems. Let me grab it. Meet the Charles Beseler 18-in Series III. As you can see, it's absolutely huge. It's also really cheap to get. I bought two for 200 bucks including shipping cost, and these lenses were produced a lot of time ago, and they were used as projector lenses in machines like this. They are no longer used nowadays and can be bought for cheap. And as one can see by the naked eye, they have a giant aperture. I can only provide an estimate for it since there's no spec sheets, but it should be around 125 mm. So, you might ask, is this a wide-angle lens as we want? Well, the 18-in in the name is telling us it's focal length, and converting to metric, that's 457 mm, which is which is roughly a 13 x zoom on your normal phone camera, and so much more than we were looking for. Oh, no. Well, we knew it was physically impossible for this to be a wide lens anyway. Also, look how crazy of a contraption you have to build in order to connect this giant lens to a camera. Though, it would produce [ __ ] teleprompter. Though, it would produce some pictures, and indeed we can see a lot of out of focus, but also a lot of zoom. Fear not, though, the Charles gives us an extra tool to work with. So far, we've always assumed that we were working with a camera like mine with a size standard sized sensor. It's called full frame. Suppose instead that we have a sensor that's double the size of mine. That would make for a pretty big camera, but still a bigger sensor is able to capture a bigger image image effectively zooming out. And this one our 457 mm lens would become a 228 mm lens, which is still not enough. So, let's double the size again. We're zooming out by a factor of two again, reaching a focal length of 114 mm. That's still too much zoom. So, let's double the size of the sensor again. We're now at 57 mm. This is better already. Then we should probably make the sensor just a big a bit bigger still so that we can be around 40 mm. This means that the size of the sensor needs to be the original size * 2 * 2 * 2 * 1.5. That is, we need to increase the sensor size by a factor of 12. My camera sensor size is 35 mm by 24 mm, which multiplied by 12 gives 420 mm by 288 mm, which is like 42 cm by 29 cm. Pretty big. That's the size of a painting you would hang on your wall. This gives us a couple of issues. Firstly, such a sensor simply doesn't exist. Films should Sorry, films shot on IMAX use very big sensors. It's actually film, but still. And we're talking about like 7 cm by 5 cm. It's not even in the expensive territory. Just doesn't exist. Secondly, lenses usually can't project an image big enough to to such a large sensor area. Most lenses are designed to be used on a full-frame camera or sensor and slightly bigger ones such as medium-size Look, I don't make the names. But the good news is that the Charles was not built nowadays. >> [laughter] >> Maybe back then they didn't get the memo about future sensor sizes. How can we check how big of an area our lens can cover? It's uh thankfully pretty easy. You simply put a lens near a white surface uh like a wall and you'll be able to see what the sensor would see. The Helios projects a rather small image on my white wall, but that's just enough to cover the similarly small full-frame sensor in my camera. I do also have lenses that project bigger images. As an example, this weird lens that I found in some used market gives us a pretty big image circle. It certainly covers a camera sensor, even a medium-size one, but not the 40 cm by 30 cm area that we need. The Charles produces a giant image. It's tough to see it exactly because the lens has to be very far away from the wall now, thus the image is very faint, but it's there. I'm not sure exactly how big it is, but trust me, it's bigger than 40 by 30 cm and this is it. Now we have to deal with the incompetence of the human mind and quickly invent a new giant bigger than anyone has ever seen and it should only take a few minutes, I guess. Jokes aside, what we need to make this work work was invented um a long time ago for camcorders. Back then we were dealing with a similar problem. We had these consumer video cameras with small very small sensors and we had pro camera lenses that were designed to handle much bigger sensors and we needed some kind of adapter that would allow to connect the two. And this adapter is called a depth of field adapter and here's how weird it looks. The idea is the following. We build a fake sensor that's actually just a semi-transparent paper and we focus the camera lens onto that fake sensor. Of course, paper by itself is not going to capture the image, but we can then go on the other side and take a picture of the resulting image like what you saw. This is a rather weird two-step process if you think about it. It needs to have a first lens that supports a bigger sensor area, then you project to a big fake sensor and then you need another smaller lens that captures the image coming out of the fake sensor onto the actual real sensor of the camera. Did you get all that? I hope you did. All of this works because a semi-transparent paper, when lit by the light rays coming out of a lens, will allow us to see exactly what a sensor would see if it would if it was placed there. The reason is that semi-transparent paper scatters light randomly and so it deviates the light rays from traveling straight to traveling towards our eyes and all other parts of the room. So, let's uh see what's required to build this in our scenario. First, we have the Charles lens which has to see the world on one side, but should be within a box on or something on the other side so that there's no light messing up with our image. And then within the box, there needs to be the 20 uh sorry, 42 cm by 30 cm fake sensor and it should be made by some semi-transparent material that scatters light without absorbing it. The Charles has a focal length a focal length of 457 mm, which tells us that the fake sensor should be at least 45.7 cm away from the lens. Also, in order to focus the lens, this distance needs to be able to increase if necessary, even by a factor of two. Then, beyond the fake sensor, but still within the dark box, otherwise light will mess everything up, there needs to be an actual camera that takes a picture or a video of the fake sensor. The distance here depends on the exact camera lens, but it's usually around 35 cm. So, let's build this. Since the distance between all components will need to be adjusted, and since all of these components weight quite a bit, um the lens just just this is 3 kg. Well, I decided to go with a metal sliding rail, more technically a V-slot 2080 for the base, and then I bought a few slightly sliding plates for it, which have a variety of holes in them. And let's start from the Charles lens. We need to hold this lens at a certain height and attach it to the base plate. And my solution was to hold a second uh plate up through some long screws and nuts to adjust the height. And then, to hold the lens, I found a couple of telescope holders, which have three axis adjustment and support lenses up to uh 15 uh centimeters in diameter. They had holes in the bottom to screw them onto the base, and then I can just insert the lens within the telescope holder and tighten the adjustment screws all around. Then, on the opposite side, I went with the same idea to hold my actual camera. However, however, we didn't need any telescope holder here, as there's a ring holder for my specific lens, which can just as easily be screwed onto the base plate. So, onto the fake sensor then. Firstly, what should be uh >> [laughter] >> What should it What should it be made of? I tried the following. Paper. Doesn't work as it captures almost all light that it receives and thus you cannot see through it. Papier-mache. How do you pronounce that? This lets some light through but still very little and it adds a very heavy texture to it. Also not ideal. Baking paper. A surprisingly good solution, but it still doesn't let much light through and still you can see a light texture and it's great for quick prototypes and I used quite a bit of it still. IKEA Pakkel fly. This is frosted window film, which does roughly what we want since it lets light through but also scatters it. This worked pretty nicely and was a great option to me, but it also introduced some heavy texture to the image uh and you can see the grains in the in the image. Wax. This almost sounds like a joke, but if you're able to create a 0.3 mm thick layer of melted wax, this should act as a great scattering surface that still lets a lot of light through. I spent quite some time attempt- attempting this, but I was ultimately unable to create a uniform layer and also it would melt on hot days like this. I still have kilograms worth of wax and I'm not sure what to do with that. >> [laughter] >> Homemade frosted glass. They are um There are, sorry, a few ways to achieve homemade frosted glass and the easiest is just to use some fine grit material between the two sheets of glass and just rub them together. I had some issues finding the right grid and was ultimately put off by the amount of work that this option required. However, it's also the option that should provide the best results. Photographic diffusion film. Okay, context. When you have a small but bright light, this will cast a very hard shadow like the sun. Uh if you instead want to turn this into a bright large light uh that cast a softer shadow, the easy way to do that is to put a diffusion film in front of the light which will diffract the light around and effectively act as a bigger softer light. This layer should absorb little light by design and is available in most photographic shops. Uh it's also cheap. I paid like 10 bucks for it and it will it works well. The only issue is that there's plenty of options and uh all of them have some texture to it and after much much experimentation, I went with a Lee Filters 251 Quarter White Diffusion which provided the best results for me. Note that it needs to be kept between two layers of glass since it's a sheet of film. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Next up, I need some component that keeps the layer of glass and attaches to the base of the plate. I decided to go with a 40 by 30 cm picture frame. The benefits The benefits of this choice are that it's a standard size, that it's easy to find glass for, and there's plenty of frames, too. There's also a drawbacks. A drawbacks. Cameras don't record enough 4 by 3 aspect ratio, but rather in open gate 3 by 2, which is a bit wider. Thus, I'll have either have to record more area and crop or only record part of the fixed sensor. Still, it's not a big deal. So, in order to secure the picture frame, I simply used a few screws. It's more stable than you would think, and note that, just like for all components here, I went through multiple iterations, and the frame that you're seeing is like the fifth different picture frame that I bought. Now, we are finally able to position all components correctly. It sounds simple, but it took some months just to get to this step. I had to receive most components from China and go through multiple iterations, but we got there. Now, for the hard part. We need bellows. Camera bellows are these components that can change their size, but remain rectangular in shape, allowing to change the distance between the lens and the sensor, but without letting light in. They are expensive. Luckily, it's easy to manufacture a small bellow. Sadly, we need an enormous one, and we still need to manufacture it ourselves. There are multiple ways to do it, and I've tried them all, but I'll keep the details light here. The general idea is that we need some material that can bend, such as paper, but within it we need some places where it cannot bend. Usually, this is done by attaching precisely cut cardboard onto some paper. Then, you can bend specific parts to make the bellow. This is a rather time-consuming and fatiguing process when the bellow is as large as I needed it to be, but after much thought and research, I was able to come up with a couple of tricks to simplify it. Firstly, all bellow images that I've shown you so far were of bellows that where the entrance rectangle is bigger than the other side, and thus they have this trapezoid look to them. This is appreciated since we've got a 40 by 30 sensor on the other side, but the lens on the other side is much smaller. However, this makes them harder to manufacture, so I decided to go with a much simpler simpler bellow that's 40 by 30 cm on both sides. Secondly, I used IKEA curtains. No, I am not kidding. Meet the Scottish. This curtain is provided folded in 3.4 cm stripes and it's available in a black color. Since it's a curtain, it's able to block light effectively and since it's IKEA, one side is plasticized and does tough to break or tear apart. This makes our job much easier and now it's just a matter of leaving the folds where the IKEA intended them, cut the curtain into four different pieces, tape them together in a different direction, and then refold the entire thing correctly. The final folds on the bellow are either the existing one in the provided curtains, possibly in the other direction, or in the places where we cut the curtain. So, everything else gets to remain more rigid. This was still a multiple hours long process, especially since I had to manufacture a couple of bellows to test different properties. This year I decided to catch up with Severance and I'm not joking when I tell you that I watched the entirety entirety of the first season whilst folding IKEA curtains, cutting them, and taping them together again. >> [sighs] >> Ultimately, I had my bellow. It doesn't look stylish, but it works. >> [laughter] >> On the lens side, I placed another picture frame with cardboard inside and made a hole at the center so that I had 40 by 30 components on both sides. Then, let's talk about the space between the fixed sensor and the camera. There's no way that I would make another bellow, >> [laughter] >> but thankfully, the distance here has to be fixed depending on the taking lens. I measured the most convenient distance and made a cardboard cardboard element with the correct sizes. It's not as sexy as the bellow, but it does the trick and if necessary, I can still insert a lens within the all that varies this distances for small adjustments. There's one final component to put in place. Right now, everything works, but I get some heavy vignetting, i.e. the corners of the fixed sensor are dark. This is expected. The frosted surface reflects some of the light, but most of it just goes through it and we don't see it. And there's an easy solution to this. Before the fixed sensor, we can place a lens that will change the direction from of the light from outwards to towards the sensor. This way, most light will still travel towards the camera after passing through the sensor. However, you should see an issue coming up. A lens that's big enough to cover physically cover a 40 by 30 sensor would require a diameter of 50 cm, which is a gigantic lens. The Charles Perreault felt pretty big already and this is just 14 cm. So, it would be extremely hard to manufacture and pricey. This is where lighthouses come to the rescue. Yes, you read that right. Lighthouses. Each lighthouse is a big source of light. However, in order to make that light shine in the right direction and at the maximum intensity, you also need to place one lens in front of it. However, a lighthouse light is even bigger than our fixed sensor and the required lens would have to be absolutely gigantic. Because of this, a new type of lens was discovered. It's called a Fresnel lens and it works similarly to a normal lens, but it's flat. >> [laughter] >> Thus, a lighthouse was able to use big flat lenses, which are much, much easier to manufacture as they don't require huge chunks of glass. And fun fact, you can actually see Fresnel lenses used in multiple places where a normal lens would be too big or expensive. As an example, my own building places first Fresnel lenses in front of exterior exterior lights to direct the light correctly. Anyhow, the good news is that we can just use a Fresnel lens without worrying about it affecting the image quality or being too expensive. They can be bought for cheap on AliExpress. They come in various sizes, including, thankfully, 40 by 30 cm. And that's everything really. Having placed a Fresnel lens, we're now able to get a usable image on the whole 40 by 30 40 by 30 cm sensor and the only thing that's left to do it is, well, shoot some scenes with it. The good news is that I had already planned to shoot a short film last month, so I brought this along and used it for multiple scenes that specifically required a very thin depth of field. I was shocked by how good results were and among amongst the many mistakes that I've done on this production, this was one of the few things I'm very proud of. Here's a few more pictures um with an earlier prototype. Now, there are a few details that should be improved in the next iteration of the system, which I decided to call Lampone. Firstly, I need to build a longer bellow. [ __ ] And buy a longer rail. This would allow to keep the lens further away from the fake sensor, which would allow to focus on closer objects. Right now, the minimum focusing distance is awfully large. Secondly, I should probably work on the structural integrity of it all. Any camera movement will generally generate weird wobbliness within the video tube. Overall, I thought it was reasonable. I've included a few pans in the scenes even, but more stability would have been beneficial. Thirdly, you can definitively see the texture of the diffusion film and even the pattern of the Fresnel lens. You can fix the former by using better ground glass and the latter by placing the Fresnel lens a bit further away from the diffusion film. There's also visible dirtiness on the fake uh sensor. I didn't really care because I felt like it added to the image, but you to get a clean video, you should be extremely careful when assembling this part. Even if all of this was fixed, one remaining issue would be that this thing is huge. Not only it requires a large minimum focusing distance, but it's also 120 cm long by itself right now, and it's pretty heavy as well. My tripod could barely hold it. This is not a problem by itself, but it does mean that it's only possible to use it with the when what the the the when there's enough room on set, and sometimes there just isn't. Another intrinsic issue is that you're losing a lot of light by doing this. There's no way around it. Scattering the light around in the fake sensor means less light reaching the actual sensor camera lens. You should consider about three stops of light reduction compared to the taking lens, i.e. the lens that they used to photograph the big sensor. That's a lot of light loss, sadly. The scenes just have to be well lit. And finally, I would like to thank the many people who posted details online about their builds. Uh the video that inspired all of this is, of course, the one by DIY Perks. He named the build next level camera, so I decided to go with that name as well. I think I went for a different enough approach that it justified its own video. And there's also a great detailed video by Media Division. All of the links in the article in the video description. I loved, by the way, that Media Division decided to include a second video for patrons with exact details for the components that they chose. It was really helpful when doing my design, even though I eventually went with quite different take. And finally, there's the F0 project, which tried to make this type of lens possible to be bought instead of just built at home. I didn't quite have the budget for that, and I feel I feel like I ended up with a slightly better specs compared to the F0, even though a worse design. But that design by them is incredible and definitely an inspiration going forward. Anyhow, I will be using this again, and I loved the experience. If you want to watch the short film, thanks. It's still in post-production, but it should come out in a couple of weeks. Uh feel free to subscribe to the website, link in the description, and I don't know, I'll post an article when it's ready. Also, if you need to shoot something with this camera or want to play with it, feel free to reach out. Uh I can't speak. How long was this? 30 minutes. Way too long. But also, like, I love this. Come on, let me >> [laughter] >> Okay, I'll stop.