Multiple Lenses for wider coverage

illumiquest · May 28, 2012

My friend has been talking about this for awhile and I'm not sure whether it would work or not. He wants to take an 8x10 camera and multiple lenses on the front of the camera, probably enlarger lenses or whatever we could find lying around. Either of the same focal length or with different focal lengths. My question is what this would look like and whether someone has tried it before, you'd get overlapping images but I'm not sure what would happen at the overlap. It'd be great to get very wide coverage on an 8x10 plate or negative.

We were also discussing tilting each lens independently to achieve funky focal plane effects you couldn't get with a standard single lens.

Has anyone tried something similar?

ruilourosa · May 28, 2012

Yup, with a miniportrait polaroid... great fun, or more or less fun, well not really fun. Just a special effect, it gets boring... if your friend has a 8x10 he should take pictures not trying to make a huge lomo to get cheesy effects...

illumiquest · May 28, 2012

well there's certainly someones opinion...

ic-racer · May 28, 2012

If you construct a mask over the film you can get a mosaic with sharp borders between the images like below. Is that what is wanted. If you don't mask it they will overlap, depending on the individual lens coverage. Using six 80mm lenses on copal 0 might fit but you'd probably have to construct a new larger front standard.
Here is a smaller version:

ic-racer · May 28, 2012

If you are not going to fire the six lenses at once, an easer way is to just mount up something like a 75 or 80mm lens and use rise/fall/shift to move it around the film and make your mosaic that way.

Old-N-Feeble · May 28, 2012

With one lens you'd run out of coverage. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the OP's friend's intention but just shooting through many lenses at once won't provide a "wider perspective". Maybe he means a different type of perspective than I'm thinking of. I don't know... maybe a flat plane with thousands or millions of identical microscopic lenses would act as one optic? I'm guessing no but I'm certain a handful of miscellaneous lenses shot like that will just look funky... or maybe way cool.

removed account4 · May 28, 2012

hey illumiquest

fun idea !

the polaroid cameras and others that take multiple images on one negative aren't really the same as what you
want to do ... they have dividers so there are no over exposure / over lapping issues.
if you open and close them one at a time, and divide your total exposure time by however many lenses
you have ( or NOT! ), i think you'll have a fun time ...
i've done similar things where i expose with one lens, remove it, put another lens on stopped down, wide open &c ..
its fun

good luck !
john

holmburgers · May 29, 2012

Yeah, what John said. You want to mount several lenses on a lensboard and let the chips fall as they may, right?

You'll get overlapping images of course, not unlike double exposures, but since their parallax differences will be relatively small, you might indeed get some interesting effects.

Now, if you add a fly's eye array, a lenticular screen or a barrier-strip, you'll be getting into turn of the century autostereoscopic territory. But that's a tale for another time....

Multiple Lenses for wider coverage

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