I’m trying to simulate a photo taken with a 70’s-era 110 pocket camera with Lightwave 3-D software. Anybody know the lens size, F-stop equivalent, focal range of a cheapie pocket camera?
I can’t give you the definitive answer here, but it might depend on the specific camera. First, 110 film IIRC is the Kodak format in a cartridge, not 35mm, so even if you knew the focal length & f stop, it would not be comparable to a 35mm SLR. (Not sure what you’re getting at with “lens size” and “focal range;” the focal length of the lens is what’s of interest. Also, not sure why your software would care about f stop unless it allows to to build a picture from scratch and it factors in depth of field.
However, a guess would be f4.5 and a moderately wide-angle lens in the range of 28-35mm.
I could answer your question, but it’s irrelevant. Exactly how do you think that applying the lens settings of a 110 camera will result in a look any different from a standard 35mm camera? The distinctive look of 110 came from the grainy prints from tiny negatives, and the blurriness caused by inability to keep a 1 oz. camera stabilized while pressing the shutter.
There were 110 SLR’s!
The lack of a pressure plate in the cartridge was another reason for poor prints.
Ditto Chas. It’s not really gonna help you that much to duplicate the effect of a 70s camera. The Kodak Ektramax 110, I just found out to my surprise, has an f1.9 lens. I would have guessed much, much higher, something in the f8-f11 range, and the equivalent of a 35mm lens.
Oh wait, I found something here
Seems I’m not going insane…seems most Pocket Instamatics were, in fact, in the f8 to f11 range. I’m not sure what the lens equivalency is, but most of the lense are 24 or 25mm in this 16mm film format, so, I think that equals around 50mm, but I’m unaware of the formula at the moment, so feel free to correct me, someone.
Anyhow, on getting the look right, Chas is spot-on; also you have to consider the fact that the lenses used in such cameras were pretty cheap, and thus the image suffered a lot from this, too.
Okay, I know about the 110 film size issues and will be dealing with them by using Photoshop plugins to add the signiture graininess and red/green color shift of 70’s photographic prints.
I’m looking for a lens size so I can simulate the proper aspect-ratio distortion you’d get with a tiny, poorly made 110 lens. I’m guessing they were about 18-22mm, so they’d probably produce alot of tweaked angles on the sides of images.
I should have mentioned that I meant “F-Stop” only as a general guess of the aperture size and light gathering abilities of a 110. I suppose it’s pretty small – perhaps the equivilent of .20 F-stop - so focal range is infinite past, say, twelve feet, but good lighting conditions are really needed?
I could probably fake some chromatic aberration in Photoshop, but it wouldn’t look realistic if you knew anything about optics. The geometric distortion near the edges would be a lot trickier.
BTW, I used to know a guy with a minox 16mm “spy camera,” my friends and I used to borrow it and shoot a few pictures, and see how good a resolution we could get. We’d always get crappy, blurry pictures, then he’d show us his pictures and they were sharp as you could want. We couldn’t figure it out, we tried everything we could think of. He strung us along and finally we wheedled his secret out of him: he used a tripod. A BIG tripod, from his Linhof view camera. I had to laugh when I saw the tiny camera attached to the huge tripod.
Inky, if you can successfully create realistic film grain with digital filters, you’ll be the first person ever to do this, including me, and believe me, I’ve tried. The problem is that film grain has a relatively organic look, the emulsion is coated in a chemical process, it’s really hard to emulate. The best way to do this is to get a high-res drum scan of some B&W film, exposed to a medium grey, from a blank, featureless light source, developed regularly. Overlay the grain in Photoshop at whatever res you desire (thus the need for a really high res scan of the original grain). That’s what I used to do. But then, I used to work at a shop with a drum scanner, I got all the free scanning I wanted.
I don’t know what you mean by the red/green shift. Are you trying to emulate fading? Or are you trying to get a Kodachrome look? This can be a lot of color trickery.
But still, the lens settings you keep asking for are irrelevant. All you need to know is that most 110 cameras shipped with moderately wide angle lenses, on a 35mm camera it would be roughly equivalent to a 35 or 40 mm lens. Just set your render view to a moderate wide angle. None of the other optical aspects can be modeled in a rendering package. Well, actually, in some programs it can, sorta. I once created a model of a multi-element lens, then rendered a view looking through the lens. You’d be insane to try this. I was insane to try this. It didn’t really work, and the insanely huge increase in rendering time (many extra levels of refraction and transparency) did not justify the results. It still looked about the same as jiggering with the standard render camera lenses.
My Pentax Auto 110 SLR had a ‘normal’ lens that was 28mm. I believe the fstop was 2.8, and that was fixed, I could not adjust it.
I loved that camera, too bad my hands are so damn big!
I suppose I’m try to depict color fading. The pictures I’m working from are old 70’s era photos which have a slight but distinct emphasis on reds and greens, suggesting the yellows and blues of the photopaper emulsion wern’t quite as lightfast.
The angle width might be pretty similar, but I’m trying pin down the distortion and tweaking you get on the edges and the slightly dead depth-of-field. I’m not going to go crazy trying for dead-on accuracy though, and will probably settle for a transparent polygonal widget with a refraction setting I like the results of. It’s for a pretty silly project, so thee no real pressure for moon landing hoax accuracy.
Yeah, the fading is usually most prominent in certain pigments, it’s usually the Magenta layer that fades most quickly. You’ll just have to play around until you get the effect you like.
There are various distortions in cheap lenses, barrel distortion, pincushion distortion, those are geometric and relatively easy to simulate in Photoshop. But the smearing near the edges is progressively worse as it nears the edges. It would be very hard to do this properly without putting it through a 3D modeller like my weird “virtual lens” rendering experiment. Most people would opt for the quick and dirty method, they’d throw a centered radial blur around just the edges, faded in gradually with a second gaussian blur mask. That’s still pretty tricky.
The shallow depth of field thing is REALLY tricky. Better to do that in-camera. But it’s probably too late now. There is an Andromeda Filter that simulates this effect, but I think it does a crappy job (plus it’s really expensive). Hey, come to think of it, I have a “Bokeru” filter designed by a Japanese guy, it might do a better job, but I don’t think there’s an English version of the plugin. I’ll check into it. But from the samples I’ve seen, doubt it will do precisely what you want.
I used to have a Minolta 110 SLR with built in Zoom/Macro lens but it had poor light gathering capacity.
It had a largest aperture setting of 2.8 but this often meant that I had to use a flash or have a slow shutter speed.
It seemed to me that it was a much slower camera than a 35mm SLR on the same aperture setting.
I now have a Leica Minilux 35mm which is not an SLR, I believe they are called viewfinder cameras or somesuch(has a pop-out lens), it has a separate viewing screen, and is very compact(it also cost a small fortune)It has the widest diameter lens I have seen fitted to this type of camera and the quality of the pictures is impressive, as good as traditional SLR’s but obviously not as flexible.
It’s not just the size that counts, its the quality…