[fwwidall]

My latest acquisition. I've been experimenting with various reversed lenses on my Pentax Auto Bellows. I read some articles on the web about using old 8mm movie lenses reversed on bellows to get high magnification. I came across this beauty from the late 1950's very cheaply on Ebay (shipping was more than the lens!) so I thought I'd give it a try.



You can see how small it is compared to an SMC Pentax-A 50mm F2.

I was able to jury-rig a mount using a an old M42 extension tube, and some masking tape ! I seem to be getting a field of view of about 1.2mm x 0.8mm, which is around 20X magnification. The working distance is very short, around 12mm, so lighting is an issue.

For comparison, using a reversed 50mm lens I get a field of view of approx. 6mm x 4mm.

I'm hoping to use it to get some great snow crystal images once Winter returns. We'll see.

Anybody else playing around with old cine lenses ? Any tips to share ?

Fred.

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Last edited by fwwidall; 06-23-2018 at 06:26 AM. Reason: typo

[photoptimist]

I've got a trio of lenses from an old 8mm movie camera. The lenses are an Elgeet 6.5mm f/2.5 wide angle, Elgeet 1/2" f/2.5, and Elgeet 1 1/2" f/3.5 Cine-Tel. I've wanted to do this, too, but have not gotten around to it.

The only tip I have is that, in theory, the image circle of an 8mm movie lens is only about 6 mm. Getting a lens with a 6 mm image circle to project enough to cover a full 35 mm frame implies a lens to sensor distance of at least 7.3 times the focal length (or 4.9X on APS-C cameras). Shorter distances might work but the corners might suffer aberrations or vignetting.

[tvdtvdtvd]

Very cool. I acquired a few 8mm lenses to use with my Q7; will have to try reversing a few of them.

[Thagomizer]

I've had great success with a reversed Kinotel 1.5" f1.9 lens. Here are some of my first results, before I discovered proper flash diffusion.

I think you'll have a lot of fun! I know I have.