What the heck is that huge lens? That Crazy Huge Lens is an IMAX Lens. You will be surprised at the cool street portraits we got with this thing. Take a look at how Jay P rigged this with his Canon EOS R camera and the amazing results.
This is Jay P Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens we are in Santa Monica at a skate park. This is a great skate park. I’ve been here before with my daughter who comes down to skate. This time I came with this huge IMAX lens. This thing is a beast. It’s an IMAX lens and it was made by Iwerks. I’ve had it in a huge hard case in my storage for a long, long time. I’ve always wanted to adapt this to a camera and take portraits with it. So I want to do street portraits with an IMAX Lens using my Canon EOS R Camera. So here’s the process I went through to get this lens adapted, so I’ll be able to focus it and work with it.
Let’s take some pictures. The way I focus this thing is so silly. I have a track that I can release here and I can move my camera back and forth inside this tape I put around the lens. Then I find the point where it focuses. It’s pretty gorilla. Very, very gorilla, but it works.
So in this situation I don’t have a lens on the front of the camera. So if the camera is going to fire without a lens on it, you have to go to the menus and you’ve have to turn on the setting which will allow the camera to fire when there’s no lens attached. There’s no coupling here. This is just a space between the lens and the front of the camera. I did have to turn that feature on that will allow me to shoot without a lens in order to make this work.
This lens is so interesting because it has a 180 degree angle of view. So I can get right here close and to the side and I’m in the shot. And I am in the shot when I move all the way around to the other side.
This lens has a really strange quality because my face is in focus, but the area around it is out of focus. It almost has a tilt shift kind of quality like it’s you’re focusing on one point. When you get somebody up front like this, it gives you a blur all the way around. It’s very cool looking.
I’m learning as we go along here, it doesn’t have a flat plane of focus, but I think that’s because of the way I mounted the camera back there. It’s a little bit like a tilt shift. So I didn’t get them quite square, which is kind of cool because I get the face in focus, but the hands or the body go out of focus in the foreground. It’s just kind of cool looking.
One of the reasons I love to carry a light in my bag is anytime I’m doing a street portrait or something, a continuous light is so easy to flip up really fast. It gives us a little bit of light on the face and opens up the shadows. The LitraStudio is perfect for that because it’s easy. Turn it on and it’s so powerful, it’s worth the weight. It’s not like one of the little tiny ones Litra makes. I like the bigger heavier light because it just gives me so much more power. Especially in a situation like this where you have the sun to deal with.
So there you have it. I’m going to do more of this. I want to adapt some other lenses to my EOS R and just try to get weird views and that kind of gritty look. This actually was way cleaner than I thought it was going to be. I don’t even have something blocking the light between the camera and the lens. I used just a little bit of tape in here. But it projects a great image on the sensor. It’s a little hard to focus but a lot of fun to shoot. So I hope you enjoyed this. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and ring that bell. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
