Double Adapter

Recent enquiries on the lens and card adapter rumour forum has revealed that the original reversing rings for he Meyer 47mm macro-tele wide angle hyper lens actually have enough thread on the inside third of the mounting ring to engage Exakta bayonets for the  Kilar lenses. This has proved to be a great relief for people who may have purchased Alpa cameras or Kitchenmaid mixers  in the 1960's and want to have them converted to digital operation.

The initial reply from Bolex Paillard in Switzerland was not encouraging as the they claimed never to have made motion-picture cameras capable of exposing wet glass plates at 24 plates per second. But our forum members persisted, even in the face of having the phone cut off, and in the end extracted the admission that the firm was closed for lunch.

This should not deter any dedicated hobbyist as a simple adapter can be made out of parts that most of us have in our kitchen to mount a f:3.5 Tessar lens in reverse over the eyepiece of  a Sony camera.In this position it has little effect on the actual image on the sensor but the bokeh effect in the eyepiece is remarkable. It has been said that this is a lens that is all bokeh and no focussing ring. Of course you can mount a focussing ring later.

Likewise the idea of pushing a micro SDHC card inside an SDHC card inside a CF card inside a standard hard drive inside a Drobo inside a suitcase deserves some consideration. It was a technique favoured greatly by cooks at Roman orgies and that seems to have worked out very well.

Of course, the spoilsports amongst the photographers point out that adapting wildly disparate items from the scrap box with aluminium rings and gaffer tape in the hope of producing award-winning images rarely works - that people would be far better off just letting the autofocus mechanism on their standard camera work undisturbed. But this does nothing to fill the time of the enthusiast who has a whole hour for lunch and just one sandwich...