Adapted Cosmicar 75mm C-Mount TV Lens on Sony a7r - Curious Photography
Holly on a track to the local woods - the bokeh and the curving holly echoing one another
Cosmicar 75mm f1.8 TV Lens
When I started to write the article Curious Photography for my website, it hadn’t really occurred to me how much my style of photography (and maybe even my general attitude towards life) has been moulded by remaining curious. I know it’s an oft quoted idea that children are born curious, and I suppose if you think about it, we do spend an awful lot of time trying to make them tiny little automatons who do as they’re told. I’m not saying we should have half feral humans running around, but I’m sure that the reason we have such utter buffoons running everything these days is because we’ve had every ounce of rebellion beaten out of us by the time we have secured a job in order to pay our rent and eat, in order to go to work and earn money to pay our rent … ad infinitum 🤣
Suffice to say, curious is a good state to be.
Way back over 10 years ago a random chat with an American fellow on Flickr led me to buying 2 Cosmicar TV lenses from eBay and having them shipped over from the States. I adapted one to my camera at the time (a Lumix G2, micro 4/3 cropped sensor) and played around with that, with some very successful and interesting results. At the time I couldn’t find a c-mount to m43 adaptor, so I hot glued whatever I had to the base of the lens and it worked pretty well.
Autumnal Bracken - Hex Bokeh (Shot with the Cosmicar 75mm TV lens adapted to a Lumix G2)
On the cropped sensor, there is hardly any noticeable vignetting, however when I adapted the second lens to mount on my full frame Sony a7r, the vignette becomes noticeably more pronounced (not that I feel this is a bad thing, and if you dislike it, you can always crop the images - note to self, see what some of the photographs on this page look like cropped!) At least this time I managed to find the correct adapter 😁
How writing about “Curious Photography” got me curious all over again 😁
It’s funny how these things work out, having spent an afternoon writing up my thoughts on how I’ve managed to stay interested in photography, and my subsequent haphazard approach to creating images, I realised it had been a while since I’d stuck something unusual on my camera! So whilst taking the dog for a local walk, I plonked my self adapted Cosmicar lens on the Sony and snapped away as we meandered through the local lanes and woods.
My plan with these short blog entries is to basically present the images as examples of my curiosity driven approach to photography. None of them are perfect, this lens has focussing and an aperture, however the aperture is controlled by an electrical current (there is presumably some kind of motor encased in the lens) previously I managed to make the aperture open and close by using a 9 volt battery connected across the wires protruding from the chunky grey bit 🤣 Further experimentation showed that shaking the lens has the same effect, you shake it, peer into the lens to check the aperture size and shake again if it’s not the required width!
These images (shot around the local lanes of Northlew in Devon) range from a fully open aperture to as small as I could make it. There’s no real way for me to tell exactly where each lies, and that’s kind of the magic of this type of experimentation.
I am so very technical.
The aperture is very loosely a hexagon shape and the glass has a spot in the centre which appears to be darkened for some reason (you can see this in the photograph below). The combination of these two anomalies, creates the rather wonderful bokeh in these images.
It should also be noted that the very best results with this lens are achieved in fairly bright sunlight (I pumps up the bokeh effect tenfold).
If I could somehow remove the “motor section” I’m sure I could probably use the lens to it’s full extent, but that’s definitely an experiment for a later date.
Here’s the “beautiful” setup that creates these images …
Keep you eye’s open for more interesting images from interesting lenses!
Although I’m always playing around with odd lenses, writing my thoughts into something concrete on my Curious Photography page has reminded me I have a shelf full of vintage lenses to play with and a box of projector and enlarger lenses that need dusting off and tinkering with! Now I also have to find the time to write a bit more for my Experiments Gallery 😍