Hope you enjoy the video! This one's coming in a bit late for the 2^14 milestone because I just finished my PhD and moved across the country (a task that's still in progress) so bear with me - the channel may be relatively empty for a bit longer while I get settled… I swear there are multiple pre-filmed vids in the pipeline that just need editing! Video corrections: None yet! Find my mistakes! =D
Congratulations about finishing your PhD! Hope you're moving somewhere warm and the surfing is ok. I know people do surf around Boston, but the waves don't seem that great.
Congrats! 🎓 You should definitely do a video on your PhD thesis!!! A lot of the practical SciComm content on TH-cam is about demonstrations, rather than actual scientific experiments. I think this is what makes a lot of YOUR content great: you see the design, the setup, the failures and the successes! It would be really cool to see that very process scaled up to the size of a PhD!
@Alan Zucconi I don't have plans to produce a lot of normal-style videos about the research itself, but I have a few in the pipeline talking about fun equipment (like the STEM) and once my dissertation is actually tuned and published, I filmed my defense and I'll probably throw that up. I tried to make it less technical than most.
There's a hidden advantage to this setup: Because it takes a picture in ultraviolet, which has a lower wavelength than visible light, it has a higher theoretical maximum resolution for a given lens size. Clearly ultraviolet cameras the the future for smartphone manufacturers on the hunt for more megapixels without increasing the size of their optics.
@@max_kl or more likely, a big little approach with fine details being captured by the UV pixels and color information being captured by physically larger pixels and overlayed. There would also need more worrying about the lens telecenricity as different frequencies refract through mediums differently (therefore focusing at different distances). This isn't much of a problem for professional or even point-shoot cameras which have enough space for corrective optics and a shallower angle between the optics and sensor but it's a major problem for even the best modern smartphones. Try taking an up close picture of something metallic with your smartphone (in the camera's RAW format) and view it on a computer and you'll notice really bad chromatic and spherical aberrations.
The diffraction limit might be higher, but that's irrelevant as the single lens will be corrected for visible light and will produce much more aberration in the UV. It is unlikely that UV would be useful in smartphone cameras. Since we don't see UV light photos taken in UV look weird as they show details that we can't normally see. They often show up slight skin blemishes that are not visible in normal light that can be artistically interesting, but not suitable for general photography. Further most normal lens materials absorb UV strongly (350nm is probably okay for normal glasses, BK7 has good transmission at 350nm), and optical plastics are even worse (i.e. PMMA). So you'd need to use exotic expensive materials to even get a reasonable amount of UV onto the sensor. You'd also need to adjust the AR coatings which would be less efficient if used over a wider range of wavelengths. Optics, just like all areas of engineering, is all about compromise. You trade off generalisation for cost and performance. If you want a lens that is good at 590nm, 546nm, and 486nm adding in the additional requirement for high performance at 350nm will reduce the performance in the visible region if you keep the lens complexity comparable. Just like you can design a fast car or you can design an off road car, but it is very hard to design a car to do both (and would you even want to).
@@joshhyyym first off, I fully agree on the limited usefulness of UV phone cameras. Two counterpoints though, there have been some promising research papers in the past 5 years about even weirder aspherical singlets that could potentially reduce UV aberrations in a primarily visible spectrum lens to the point that UV sensors might be viable. *These exotic lenses are currently only in the research phase and won't be financially viable for at least 8 years. Also, the overwhelming majority of modern smartphones lenses aren't singlets. Many current models are rocking 5-8 elements.
The cyanotype process is self-inhibiting - the forming dye blocks off UV from hitting the light sensitive iron 3 oxalate. I ran into this issue myself. You will achieve a massive sensitivity increase by just coating the paper with the photosensitive iron 3 salt of choice (I use a mix of Fe3Cl and oxalic acid) and developing the latent-ish (visible as a discoloration of the yellow sensitiser) image in a ferricyanide (or ferrocyanide for a positive image) bath. I got an overexposed image with an f4.5 tessar (4 element, the less glass in the lens the better the uv transmissivity) with just 4h of june sun exposure.
very cool! that last one is the best cyanocamera image I've seen in terms of sharpness and uniformity! there were only a few examples I was able to find online before starting this. what was your f/ ratio and how big was your paper relative to the lens?
The fact that you're still only at 18k subs is insane. You stated that you don't want to make a patreon because of your random schedule, but honstly, I'd still support it. You could just make it a support per video. I support several channels that only release 1 or 2 videos a year
Amazing, I would turn your both photos into negatives to see the photo as it should be seen, it will give you a positive image of your house but with yellow colors
I even suggest trying 3 exposures of the same frame using RGB filters. Scan the result and try to get a color photo :-) It looks like a lot of work but also a lot of fun: D
@@Aldhafara But the photographic material is only sensitive to ultraviolet. You could try to get a false-color image but you would need some pretty rare filters.
@@bdijkstra1982 It could be doable with phosphor sheets that absorb the light color you're after and radiate UV instead. Though triple exposure is already impractical; the last thing it needs is multiple hours per exposure.
Spherical abberation is actually an well known issue (with an stupitidly simple solution) that commonly got solved by astrophotographers in the 70's and 80's: Just curve the film. Back in those days astrophotographers used so called "Schmidt-Cameras" to capture images of Deep-Sky-Objects, such as galaxies and star clusters. These cameras where build sort of like an Newtonian without an secondary mirror but an place to attach films and where widespread. Schmidt-cameras suffer from the same issue due to its curved focal plane. To curve and cut the films into round shapes they stamped them out using special stampers, that could deform and cut simultaniously. The real question for your camera is, whether you have to curve in or out and at whitch radius. An other option would be an Field-Flattener lens. BUT they get used for corrections on the scale of an fullframe sensor, not at the scale of an whole paper. So a bit too pricy and complex, considering you would have to custom-make that lens. Fun fact: Today curved sensors are relevant and there are rumors Sony works on curved sensors for a better image-quality without expensive optics. The Kepler space telescope is actually an modern Schmid-Camera with an array of curved sensors. Hope this will help or at least inspire you.
@@1906Farnsworth You may want to realize that actually there is no such a thing as a focal *plane* which is a idealization due to paraxial approximation and stuff like that. With small formats things are pretty almost planar to a fair degree of precision but conventional cameras with flat films or flat sensors may still suffer from spherical aberrations. The latter can actually be compensated (partially) by engineering non-spherical lenses (just notice how many lenses with "aspherical" in their name are around) or by placing the sensitive element on a curved surface, because in the end of the day focus in real life never occurs completely on a plane. That being said, no perfect lenses can be achieved so the choice of correcting this or other importan aberrations is part of the chemistry that gives to each lens and each imaging solution its flavour (or lack thereof).
A person might have guessed that the cyan from cyanotype came from the word cyanide, but it just comes from the greek color word cyanos, for dark blue, which is where the word cyanide also gets its name.
Wikipedia I think claims cyanide comes from the color cyan, specifically because they isolated cyanide-containing compounds FROM Prussian Blue. weirdest bit of etymology I'd never considered!
Those prints are so satisfying, the blue is such a lovely color! To get more light I think you only have one option: rebuild Herschel's 7ft newtonian telescope as a camera 😇 Can't get a better light bucket than a big newtonian! :)
I adore that dark blue! the actual "blueprints" that I did before packing this setup to move were really satisfying (Transistorman, the Turboencabulator, and a 2nd try at the play button). I wonder how far I could project an image in broad daylight from my dad's 12" dob...
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Sadly, you will find that it is worse for making cyanotypes. What you are after is the lowest possible f/stop to create the brightest possible image. This is, for simple lenses/mirrors, the opposite of high magnification. Mind you, if you can afford a (say) f2.8 100mm lens, you will get magnificent results.
I can actually say something because this is my wheelhouse, and I research this for a living as a photograph conservator! I would have a couple of suggestions on this. 1) In regards to aberrations, a simple way to get rid of them is to make a symmetric doublet, and for the focal length you are at, the easiest way to do it would be to get two +1 diopter reading glass blanks, which would add up to 500mm together, and then you could add a lens to bring it up to the 350 mm range using the lens makers formula. If you get your positive meniscii from surplus shed, you can get it pretty cheap, and just use PVC pipe to mount. Also will let you pick your aperture, because some of those meniscii get massive. 2) sensitivity: a good rule of thumb with these things is that water helps with speed. You are on the right track with Ware’s formula ( as a crystallography thing, his cyanomicon is a great read because of how Prussian blue works, and is free online). Arpan Mukherjee’s work using different iron salts is also good, and can be found on alternative photography .com. A final hint would be to sensitize, and dry your paper, but then humidify it using a wet blotter behind it. Wet paper gains around a spot of speed. 3) if you really want to make a project, explore science, and cry, try Lippmann plates. Gabriel Lippmann got a Nobel prize for his work, and a paper which came out just a month ago showed that the Lippmann plate is actually a multispectral resolving surface, so you can actually use the images as a tough imaging spectrometer (good luck, it will never happen because it is so finicky, but in theory, it does work)
So, since these were essentially negatives, and I have sometimes in the past found it difficult to 'evaluate' or 'analyze' what's in a photo from its negative, I wanted to see what inverted images would look like. Thought somebody else might find this interesting, so here's a link to imgur gallery with the photos processed (simply inverted, or inverted and desaturated to mimic black and white photography): imgur.com/a/v2c4SXv . I have to say, I really like the photo from the front of the house, especially with the blue/yellow color scheme.
Two ideas: reduce spherical aberration by adding a "mold" behind the paper that brings it into focus everywhere (or at least along the longer side to avoid crinkles). Also you could try to use vacuum (maybe a battery powered aquarium pump?) to press the paper down. Great content as always, keep it up!
When the paper is wet it could be sandwiched in a curved mold, then a similar mold would be in the camera to tape the paper to. Then it could all be in focus
Yeah, the bending of the paper definitely gave some unintended inspiration! It might be hard to form the paper to a dome and get it flat again after. But even if you bend it over a curved ridge, that’ll reduce the aberration to only one axis.
@@wsshambaugh Indeed - crafting spherical paper isn't hard, but how do you hang it in a frame later? Having it bent into a cylinder removes the aberration along the horizontal, longer axis
@@wsshambaugh you can fold the paper into the curved mold by making wrinkles, then after you developed, you unfold it. you are going to get some areas without development, but you get rid of the aberration. I do that to fit a flat piece of paper filter into my semi-dome coffee machine, it works.
The head lab tech at my old schools photography department would take multi month exposures with long since expired photo print paper. She'd abandon pinhole cameras hidden around the city. It was pretty cool seeing the sun tracks shift as the months past on a single photo.
If you didn’t know, there are special transparencies made for printing onto with an inkjet. There are some with a dry gel like layer that absorbs ink well (but washes off with water), and there are also waterproof ones that I think are just made to be particularly porous. Less smudging than using a normal transparency. To get a particularly opaque printing, it’s often necessary to print extra ink (CMY and black all at once), which of course means smudge mitigation is even more important. Big Clive’s videos introduced these transparencies to me for the purpose of making circuit boards with dry film photoresist, which is a rather similar process to your masking of cyanotype paper. Of course, a laser printer doesn’t have those issues at all.
These are supposedly inkjet-friendly, but alas they literally never dry... I’ll get a laser printer someday just for this kind of thing - I don’t print much in the way of “real” paper xD
When I was a young lad working in a hospital, I had access to xray film stock, which is around 8 x 10 inches. So, I built am 8 x 10 camera with a magnifying-glass lens... When I exposed the xray film and developed it, it came out quiet well... It's perfect for contact printing...
X-ray film has been a favorite of the large format community for many years for its cheapness and availability. Not the best for visible light photography, but it works.
I truly enjoy your videos! I used to be an exchange student in physics at UCSB 2013-2014 and these videos bring me a great sense of nostalgia on top of the wounderful content. I currently work as a postdoc focusing on spectroscopy of antihydrogen at CERN, let me know if you ever have your way past one day:) As for myself, I dream that the next conference I attend is at UCSB!
I have found that most things science that is fun is directly proportional to its potential to bursting into flames. so this camera is thereby a more fun camera to use scientifically speaking.
These subscriber doubling benchmarks seem to be happening faster and faster (even though the numbers separating them are getting bigger and bigger!). Keep it up!
I’ve made similar cyanocameras by using USPS Medium Flat rate boxes, paired with a plastic fresnel-lens magnifying sheet in front, and a sheet of cyanotype paper inside the box. With the large fresnel collector lens in front, exposures happen in about an hour and the density of image can be similar to the results seen here. Sharpness from a Flat-Rate Cyanocamera is dependent on the quality of the fresnel; I’d say it’s comparable to a soft-focus Petzvall. Keep the fresnel lens in the shade: this will prevent the sun’s image from focusing back of the box and lighting the whole thing on fire. :)
I love home made cameras! I made one of these with a box and a magnifying glass. I didn't use a sensor, I just loved looking at the image it created with my eyes. It feels so unreal to see a lens completely transfer a view onto a sheet of paper.
There are these lenses called f-theta lenses, that are used often in laser scanning applications. As the name suggests they have a flat focal plane, so you won't have any spherical aberrations. They do get expensive fast, but maybe you can look into how you can stack some simple lenses to achieve a similar result!
40 years ago we did this with 8x10 (inch) film negatives and the lens from a copy camera that would make 20x24 inch negatives. Then, since we worked in photo labs would print from the exposed film and make 40x60 inch prints. We also used super glossy positive paper to get a slick magazine quality instant picture, albeit backwards. We'd go out for lunch with the cameras and process them in the machines and have prints in less than an hour. The rod technique you used was designed to make "rubdowns" of type or images that could be transferred to paper for layout by rubbing the back of the velum original. The rods had thousands of circular grooves that would evenly spread the photo solution on the velum. After 4 or 5 passes of different pigments and photo sensitive chemicals, the velum was exposed and processed.
I'm not ditching my DSLRs! I started my photo education in 1947 with a Brownie Flash 620; it took me 40 years to get to the stage you got to in however many minutes it took you to prepare to do this video. Now I have all these obsolete film cameras that are too nice to throw out, but they ARE just paper-weights now.
This is fun! Suggestion #1: Use photographic paper instead of that cyanoshite. It isn't fast, a mere ISO 3 or so, but way better than what you have now and all you need is developer (and stop?) and fix to process it. Rince it well. Suggestion #2: Use large format film and develop it yourself and then make use of contact photos on photographic paper. Since film has way higher photosensitivity, this eases the job a lot Suggestion #3: Drop the lense and use a pinhole instead. You can find tons of pages describing pinhole cameras, but the basics are just focal length == length between hole and film (or whatever) and aperture == focal length / diameter of pinhole. So a focal length of 200mm and a pinhole of 1mm gives you an aperture of f=1/200. With pinhole, everything is in focus, ish, since there isn't a lens, but it'll get more blurry the larger the larger hole. It'll aso get more blurry with a smaller hole, just as it does with tiny apertures with a camera with a lens - all because of diffraction. Good luck and happy photographing :)
I had one thought, if no one else has mentioned it. Since the cyanotype process creates a relatively high contrast image, you could try a fine screen over the medium as is used in the printing trades to prepare plates for photographic reproduction.
I've seen someone turn an entire hotel room into a giant pinhole camera. He made a pinhole using black paper on the window with a hole and covered the back wall with numbered sheets of print paper, then reversal processed and re-assembled them. I really like the idea of large, impromptu cameras.
Sometimes we fixate on details we think are core to a project. Have you considered _different_ photo media? For example you can still buy enlarging paper in silver halide, various color papers and even cyanotype. All of these could be used directly in your camera and produce really awesome looking negative prints. In the case of the cyanotype paper, you could also use some to see if it performs better than your own. You also might be able to do your own silver halide process. It won't be the cool blue and white, but it might expose faster.
I'm absolutely going to be looking at more chemistries! I chose cyanotype for this first attempt because it was really cheap and easy to coat large areas
Have you thought about deliberately curving the paper? Like instead of a flat plane you used a concave cylinder. You might get some interesting fish-eye effects with a low focal length. Also maybe do some solarigraphy.
I actually did considerer a curved sheet to help combat the spherical aberration - didn't get to talk about that in the video. I could get the edges of the frame to look "sharper" if they curved forward towards the lens, but unfortunately I really just replaced blur with stigmation, so the edges of the image still looked pretty bad. With a faster chemistry where I could get away with a smaller aperture, I'll be all about fun tiltshift things!
Most lenses are made of materials that block the UV that will darken the print, thus it takes a long time to work. You need either fused quartz lens which pass UV, some other type of UV transparent made into a lens, a pinhole camera with no lenses or a reflecting mirror ( Newtonian) to project the image onto the paper.
The blur on the edges is called comatic aberration. You can fix it with a couple extra lenses, a Plano-convex and a Plano-concave one. I suggest talking to people that build telescopes, your aperture is large enough to fit somewhat in the same realm of imaging. Also, you can look into how tele lens are set up. You can ignore all the chromatic correction lenses and only try to mimic the coma correction, since you're imagining one wave length.
Cheap spherical glass lens on amazon - should have checked but didn't! All my stuff is with the movers now so it'll be a while before I can test... That experiment was crossing my mind earlier today while I was contemplating the more complex aspherical lenses recommended by others here in the comments.
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Mirrors would also alleviate longitudinal chromatic abberation. Your lens probably doesn't focus visible light and UV light in the same plane. The UV will focus farther from the lens than the visible light and behind the sensitive paper, if you use visible light to focus.
17:26 I have the same photo!!! "Pale blue dot". Also at the bottom of it, I have the quote by Carl Sagan. You're a very smart individual with a great grasp on sciencetific method and much more. Keep up the GREAT work!!!
I think you'll like this music video: NIGHTWISH - 'Ad Astra' - [World Land Trust Partnership] (OFFICIAL VIDEO) th-cam.com/video/VshpPBBehxE/w-d-xo.html
Great video. I have been working with this process for several years and love making "in camera" cyanotypes. Something you might consider is trying "Nature Print Paper" in your camera. That is what I have ended up using for the last two years or so. I can get a great image with an 8 hour sunny day exposure.
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel I am using 19th century and early 20th century view cameras. I use "Nature Print Paper" as it is pre-coated cyanotype paper that is available.
This should be a MANDATORY PROJECT in all schools. Just 1 example how so many things nowadays are being taken for granted, yet centuries of research, development and try&error went into all of those...
I have watched this video I think 3 times now, and I find it ammusing that you have, in the last 3 days, basically tippled your sub count to where you need to do the 2^15, and are half way to needing 2^16. I wish you luck on getting those done soon.
I’ve always used cheap glass for my contact printing frames. I have a book on alternative photographic processes and it is avid about not using acrylic.
This isn't about this video specifically, but I'm really glad I found this channel. I find myself "running out" of things to watch on TH-cam because it's terrible at recommending things to me, but luckily I got the golf ball simulation video from another coding video, and decided to check out the other videos. I'm constantly looking for channels that feel like worthy additions to the "Steve Mould, Applied Science, Stuff Made Here, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day" category, and this is definitely it.
If I lived anywhere near the same continent, I'd make my best effort to add you to my friend list. Highly intellectual and approachable character. I love your videos.
Your comment about the photographic paper bowing outwards and subsequent solution made me realize why old time cameras used photographic plates with the paper sandwiched between.
maybe use a massive freznel lens... since you are not going to get insane focus with the rough surface of paper, you could have way more light coming in.
I wonder whether using an imaging fresnel lens would allow you to use a significantly larger lens, allowing more light in and cutting down on exposure times, and possibly reduce the spherical abberation (though trading it with the artefacts from the fresnel ridges).
My brother and I build a 80x80cm camera last year, it is huge but a lot of fun. Ivan highly recommend the ra4 color reversal process, it takes direct color prints in camera. You need a color filter and some chemicals,but my brother is better informed than me. The color image appears in a step where you can see the inverted bw image switch to the correct colors.
OK, I have a couple of suggestions, coming from someone who has 1. Done cyanotype, 2. Built my own 20-24 camera in the past from black foamcore, and 3. used ULF cameras for a long time... Back when I was a kid, we did something similar to what you are doing, but we used a overhead projector to do it. You know, what I'm talking about? One of those things with a light source and you put a piece of film on it that you can draw on and then there's a mittor and lens aboe that you can aim at the screen and focus? These things a PERFECT for going the other direction. You basically need to make a black tent for the area from the lens down to the light table, and then you place the cyanotype paper on the light table (and don't turn it on, the light comes the other direction). It becomes a bit of a camera obscura, and all you need is a white piece of paper to focus and compose on before you put the cyanotype paper in there. The lens is pretty large, and who knows what the aperture is??? But it will have some chromatic aberrations in it, so it isn't perfect, which produces some of the dreaminess that you may like (or not, of course). The exposures are likely to be much shorter because the lens is going to be reasonably fast. If you want to try to improve the image quality and start to eliminate a lot of the artifiacts that you nay not like (towards a "perfect" image), you will need to redesign the camera to ensure that the light that is coming inside the camera but isn't part of the image on the paper is dealt with a lot better. That light is a source of FLARE. Not necessarily the lens flare that you think of from J J Abrams' movies, but a general loss of contrast in the image that will sometimes be uniformly distributed, but sometimes be concentrated on one side or another. This is in part due to the light getting in through the lens and then bouncing around inside before eventually hitting the cyanotype paper as randomized (not image-forming) light. Eliminate that, and you will have a lot more contrast in your images. I can get into why but the key to focus on is eliminating that extra light wherever possible.
Great video! I think you’re still getting a lot of light leak through the box. You might want to double up the poster board with overlapping layers. Also, covering the lens before and after you’re taking your photo would probably help with as well. Any time the lens is open that paper is collecting light
I made a pinhole camera out of a Pringles can back in the day, very cool fisheye type pictures as the photo paper inside was curved to the inside of the can.... Much smaller aperture tho. Keep up the great work.
Great video. I've always wanted to see a cyanotype camera in action. It may be worthwhile considering curving the film plane. Also using a splash of hydrogen peroxide after washing will bring out the deep blue quicker and so give you a better idea of final contrast.
Oof I'm a little late to this to add anything worthwhile. Your exposure time isn't going to get better with your current setup, but you do need to press the "film" behind glass. I'd also recommend using finer paper - details are being lost in the "grain" of the paper texture. Seeing the blueprints in the video I'm assuming you know about the peroxide trick, which can add significant contrast. Also dude, keep going with this! Van Dyke & Kallitype are both extremely similar to the cyanotype and may be a bit more sensitive (citation needed). There's also the Platinum/palladium option which you can buy pre-mixed (for a price!!) and use to make a negative with the same method. I love this stuff, and would _love_ to see more content about it.
Suggestion for the next revision. Mold paper into a spherical shape to address the focus issue created by the large aperture. Would make for cool wall art also! Can’t wait to see the next version!
I think some blinders on the outside of the lens would go a long way to help the whole trying to start itself on fire thing. Like what you see on broadcast cameras to block stray light
absolutely - all my regular camera lenses have hoods - I just wasn't sure how massive of a hood I would need here (and what angle I could place it at to not vignette) and didn't realize I'd ever be shooting south with it... shoulda thought that one through
Since it uses UV light to create an image, could you use something like Wood's glass since Acrylic isn't very UV transparent? It's opaque to transparent light, but you could slide it in after you focused your camera
Can you help reduce the spherical aberration by using an aspheric lens? Or maybe you could purposefully bow the paper by using a jig? Love the video as always!
So this might be a whole new project but could you capture the image on thermal paper and use a mirror to transfer the image onto cyanotype? It might speed up your development time, plus it would allow you to print a "positive" onto the cyanotype, in addition to allowing you to print a thermally captured image onto UV sensitive paper (which just kinda sounds cool).
One ways that you could potentially fix the aberrations is by adding a second lense to get the light rays to be parallel when they hit they sheet of paper. A flexible lense (like one of those plastic fresnel lenses) could work.
Curve the back along the horizontal/long axis to (better) match the focal plane curve caused by the lens, to achieve focus over a wider area of the paper. This curve will also insure that the paper will stay in contact with the backing plate. Use a cardboard strip around the lens about 25mm in width that shades the top half of the lens, like an awning. You could of course decrease your exposure time by using a huge (250-300mm) lens to gather 5-6x more light and have that focus on your 55mm lens: forming a telescope setting, allowing for double the change for being out of focus.
Interesting video, I've been wanting to do similar for ages. Have you thought about doing a daguerrotype image on glass, and then taking a blueprint from that? It's been a while since I looked at it, but I think you would have a non-inverted image as a result.
isn't that the one that requires fuming mercury? I think that's why i avoided it xD I'll absolutely be looking into more chemistries though - this was too fun
After the introduction I was kind of expecting you to somehow take the picture three times with R,G,B color filters before the lens and paint over with the cyano, magenta and yellow to get the a colored picture, but i guess that is unfeasible Great work!
A few suggestions: 1) did you test the lens for UV transmission in the same way you tested the acrylic? if it fails find another lens. 2) Hold the paper flat using vacuum against a 3/32" acrylic "back board", that you sanded, or lightly sand blasted to make it a "ground glass" focusing screen. By mounting it in a sturdy wood frame with 3 bars behind it spaced about an inch back, and 9 small (#4 of #6) 2" long flat head screws, you could "dish" it to match the curvature of the lens's image field. For a vacuum pump, perhaps one of those sold to suck the air out of a home freezer bags that is powered by 2 AA batteries, and after 15 seconds or so, run it on just 1.5 volts perhaps via a voltage reducer and a 12 V car battery, or a bunch of "D" cells, wired in parallel. Another option is a small home aquarium air pump in a sealed "Coffee can" with the outlet hose to air, and the "coffee can" being in vacuum, would require 120 VAC, although I think that there are some made that run on batteries for people with expensive fish in case of power outages.
One thing you could do to speed up the exposure time is to use photographic print paper which I vaguely remember has different rates of reaction to a light source. This would give you two options for light sensitive medium where both are utilized dependent on aim.
Applied Science had a video about photolithography, and in that they used a vaccum to hold the film against a backplate -- maybe you could do a similar thing to avoid having to use tape?
Have you considered adding compound or macro lenses? Maybe apply the reactant on the paper in multiple layers? Try applying the reactant in a spray using an airbrush?
Congratulations on so many interesting comments. I have not yet read them all. But I do know that a "lens hood" aka "lens shade" will give you two advantageous improvements by preventing sunlight from directly hitting the lens. First, it will reduce flare and glare, thus improving image contrast. Second, it will greatly reduce the chances of combustion. And a lens hood is as simple as rolled up black paper.
If you can find one, the lens from a scanner or photocopier, the old school ones that didn't use a scanner bar, work surprisingly well. You could of course make actual silver emulsion a la wet plate method. That is fun to do.
You could add a lens hood to reduce the chance of sunlight coming directly through the lens and starting a fire. You might also try getting some older glass from a recycler that does not have UV resistance (whether from additives or via film coating) to hold down the print. _Mattieu Stern_ has some great videos on adapting antique lenses which is another great option for exploring different optical solutions. Thanks for sharing your journey.
You could compensate for some of that spherical aberration by using a curved panel to mount the paper on. It would give you a band in the middle that's in focus. You just have to match the curvature of the lens adjusted for focal length. You could do a spherical sector but getting paper to conform to that would be difficult.
What material is your lens made of? Glass is pretty opaque to UV below 400nm, quartz/fused silica would probably go a LONG way to reducing exposure time. UV transparent (UVT) acrylics also do exist, though UV filtering acrylic is much more common
Hey there buddy, hope you’re doing OK been checking your channel often and re-watching old videos. So exciting to see someone like you make videos, and I hope you make more soon. Hope everything is going well
It would be cool to set it up for a camera shot but also place a print slide on the paper. You could essentially photoshop in the silhouette a person using the slide against the backdrop of scenery or something. I used to play around with these blue print sheets as a kid. I must have gone through a pack of 50 pages in a week when I first got them. I love simple kits like that. It was more fun than my gameboy honestly, because I had to think about what I wanted to expose next and how to create cool prints.
I was recently thinking of doing this exact process, but with a 35mm film camera; call it a CSLR. Your bespoke setup looks like a 500mm f/5.6; so perhaps using a 50mm f/1.8 will give at least 3 f-stops better performance and also remove the optical aberrations of a single-lens setup. Instead of an 8 hour exposure, I can hope for better than 2-hours. The drawback is obviously that the final print will be, at best, a ~45mm circular print, but I'll take it.
You should make a photo emulsion! Maybe gelatin based like silver halide film, spread on transparency sheets or glass. Then you could make contact prints.
7:39 if you wrote it in mirror text, then flipped it so the ink side is touching the paper, you'd get a more crisp image. 8:15 If you print the graphic mirrored and expose it with the ink side down, that will increase the fidelity of your exposure. Basically, the light leaks under the graphic through the plastic carrier. The thickness of the transparency causes the "smudging", blurring the shadow as it's floating above the paper. I'm a graphic artist. I used to expose metal plates for pad printing. I used to send my graphics to a shop that created masks using a photo process. I'd send the graphic flipped (mirror) so that when I apply the film as a mask, the ink side would be the side touching the masking gel. This would give me higher resolution crisp graphics during exposure.
I remember doing something like that when someone needed durable barcodes that could be scanned hundreds of times a day without getting rubbed off the page. I discovered the way to do it was to print it backward on transparency plastic, and then flip it over so they scanned the back. The toner didn't rub off but eventually the plastic got too scratched up and scattered the laser. It worked a lot longer than the old method though, and at a reasonable cost.
Try using Vinegar in the developing solution to alter the acidity, this can reduce the needed exposure times by half. Your paper quality and surface seems to be rather important for quality and lifespan of the print.
In my book... you're already rivalling Applied Science and Breaking Taps with your content and presentation. Not to downplay their videos in any way. Just a sincere compliment.
Hope you enjoy the video! This one's coming in a bit late for the 2^14 milestone because I just finished my PhD and moved across the country (a task that's still in progress) so bear with me - the channel may be relatively empty for a bit longer while I get settled… I swear there are multiple pre-filmed vids in the pipeline that just need editing!
Video corrections:
None yet! Find my mistakes! =D
Congratulations about finishing your PhD! Hope you're moving somewhere warm and the surfing is ok. I know people do surf around Boston, but the waves don't seem that great.
Thanks! I'll be in Raleigh/Durham, so very warm, and the beach is just a couple hours away!
Congrats! 🎓
You should definitely do a video on your PhD thesis!!!
A lot of the practical SciComm content on TH-cam is about demonstrations, rather than actual scientific experiments.
I think this is what makes a lot of YOUR content great: you see the design, the setup, the failures and the successes!
It would be really cool to see that very process scaled up to the size of a PhD!
Its a bummer you moved cross country. I live an hour north of Santa Barbara/Goleta and and it was nice to see a local on the big youtube screen.
@Alan Zucconi I don't have plans to produce a lot of normal-style videos about the research itself, but I have a few in the pipeline talking about fun equipment (like the STEM) and once my dissertation is actually tuned and published, I filmed my defense and I'll probably throw that up. I tried to make it less technical than most.
There's a hidden advantage to this setup: Because it takes a picture in ultraviolet, which has a lower wavelength than visible light, it has a higher theoretical maximum resolution for a given lens size. Clearly ultraviolet cameras the the future for smartphone manufacturers on the hunt for more megapixels without increasing the size of their optics.
Ha, and then they'll need even more clever software to imagine the real colors
UV is also much more hazy over long distances.
@@max_kl or more likely, a big little approach with fine details being captured by the UV pixels and color information being captured by physically larger pixels and overlayed.
There would also need more worrying about the lens telecenricity as different frequencies refract through mediums differently (therefore focusing at different distances). This isn't much of a problem for professional or even point-shoot cameras which have enough space for corrective optics and a shallower angle between the optics and sensor but it's a major problem for even the best modern smartphones. Try taking an up close picture of something metallic with your smartphone (in the camera's RAW format) and view it on a computer and you'll notice really bad chromatic and spherical aberrations.
The diffraction limit might be higher, but that's irrelevant as the single lens will be corrected for visible light and will produce much more aberration in the UV. It is unlikely that UV would be useful in smartphone cameras. Since we don't see UV light photos taken in UV look weird as they show details that we can't normally see. They often show up slight skin blemishes that are not visible in normal light that can be artistically interesting, but not suitable for general photography.
Further most normal lens materials absorb UV strongly (350nm is probably okay for normal glasses, BK7 has good transmission at 350nm), and optical plastics are even worse (i.e. PMMA). So you'd need to use exotic expensive materials to even get a reasonable amount of UV onto the sensor. You'd also need to adjust the AR coatings which would be less efficient if used over a wider range of wavelengths.
Optics, just like all areas of engineering, is all about compromise. You trade off generalisation for cost and performance. If you want a lens that is good at 590nm, 546nm, and 486nm adding in the additional requirement for high performance at 350nm will reduce the performance in the visible region if you keep the lens complexity comparable. Just like you can design a fast car or you can design an off road car, but it is very hard to design a car to do both (and would you even want to).
@@joshhyyym first off, I fully agree on the limited usefulness of UV phone cameras.
Two counterpoints though, there have been some promising research papers in the past 5 years about even weirder aspherical singlets that could potentially reduce UV aberrations in a primarily visible spectrum lens to the point that UV sensors might be viable. *These exotic lenses are currently only in the research phase and won't be financially viable for at least 8 years.
Also, the overwhelming majority of modern smartphones lenses aren't singlets. Many current models are rocking 5-8 elements.
The cyanotype process is self-inhibiting - the forming dye blocks off UV from hitting the light sensitive iron 3 oxalate. I ran into this issue myself. You will achieve a massive sensitivity increase by just coating the paper with the photosensitive iron 3 salt of choice (I use a mix of Fe3Cl and oxalic acid) and developing the latent-ish (visible as a discoloration of the yellow sensitiser) image in a ferricyanide (or ferrocyanide for a positive image) bath. I got an overexposed image with an f4.5 tessar (4 element, the less glass in the lens the better the uv transmissivity) with just 4h of june sun exposure.
very cool! that last one is the best cyanocamera image I've seen in terms of sharpness and uniformity! there were only a few examples I was able to find online before starting this.
what was your f/ ratio and how big was your paper relative to the lens?
Fe(III)Cl, FeCl3, or Fe(3)Cl. But never Fe3Cl.
@@posysajrazdwatrzy that's awesome!
I consume some oxalic acid on occasion
Shamrocks are nice and tart
I got no idea what any of this means but damn it’s cool
The fact that you're still only at 18k subs is insane.
You stated that you don't want to make a patreon because of your random schedule, but honstly, I'd still support it.
You could just make it a support per video. I support several channels that only release 1 or 2 videos a year
I'm soon to start a REAL job, so I don't know if that will leave me with more time for youtube or less lol
What channels do you mean?
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel you might have to quite given the sudden subscriber explosion
@@lugaidster 170k now
Amazing, I would turn your both photos into negatives to see the photo as it should be seen, it will give you a positive image of your house but with yellow colors
I even suggest trying 3 exposures of the same frame using RGB filters.
Scan the result and try to get a color photo :-)
It looks like a lot of work but also a lot of fun: D
@@Aldhafara But the photographic material is only sensitive to ultraviolet. You could try to get a false-color image but you would need some pretty rare filters.
@@bdijkstra1982 oh
Indeed, I completely forgot about that fact. 😕
@@bdijkstra1982 It could be doable with phosphor sheets that absorb the light color you're after and radiate UV instead. Though triple exposure is already impractical; the last thing it needs is multiple hours per exposure.
Spherical abberation is actually an well known issue (with an stupitidly simple solution) that commonly got solved by astrophotographers in the 70's and 80's:
Just curve the film.
Back in those days astrophotographers used so called "Schmidt-Cameras" to capture images of Deep-Sky-Objects, such as galaxies and star clusters. These cameras where build sort of like an Newtonian without an secondary mirror but an place to attach films and where widespread. Schmidt-cameras suffer from the same issue due to its curved focal plane.
To curve and cut the films into round shapes they stamped them out using special stampers, that could deform and cut simultaniously.
The real question for your camera is, whether you have to curve in or out and at whitch radius.
An other option would be an Field-Flattener lens. BUT they get used for corrections on the scale of an fullframe sensor, not at the scale of an whole paper. So a bit too pricy and complex, considering you would have to custom-make that lens.
Fun fact: Today curved sensors are relevant and there are rumors Sony works on curved sensors for a better image-quality without expensive optics. The Kepler space telescope is actually an modern Schmid-Camera with an array of curved sensors.
Hope this will help or at least inspire you.
There are no curved focal planes. ;-)
@@1906Farnsworth please explain?
@@gregbailey45 A plane is defined as a flat surface.
@@1906Farnsworth You may want to realize that actually there is no such a thing as a focal *plane* which is a idealization due to paraxial approximation and stuff like that. With small formats things are pretty almost planar to a fair degree of precision but conventional cameras with flat films or flat sensors may still suffer from spherical aberrations. The latter can actually be compensated (partially) by engineering non-spherical lenses (just notice how many lenses with "aspherical" in their name are around) or by placing the sensitive element on a curved surface, because in the end of the day focus in real life never occurs completely on a plane. That being said, no perfect lenses can be achieved so the choice of correcting this or other importan aberrations is part of the chemistry that gives to each lens and each imaging solution its flavour (or lack thereof).
A person might have guessed that the cyan from cyanotype came from the word cyanide, but it just comes from the greek color word cyanos, for dark blue, which is where the word cyanide also gets its name.
Wikipedia I think claims cyanide comes from the color cyan, specifically because they isolated cyanide-containing compounds FROM Prussian Blue. weirdest bit of etymology I'd never considered!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Yea I was actually reading on it today so I can confirm it's Wikipedia that says that
Those prints are so satisfying, the blue is such a lovely color! To get more light I think you only have one option: rebuild Herschel's 7ft newtonian telescope as a camera 😇 Can't get a better light bucket than a big newtonian! :)
I adore that dark blue! the actual "blueprints" that I did before packing this setup to move were really satisfying (Transistorman, the Turboencabulator, and a 2nd try at the play button). I wonder how far I could project an image in broad daylight from my dad's 12" dob...
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Sadly, you will find that it is worse for making cyanotypes. What you are after is the lowest possible f/stop to create the brightest possible image. This is, for simple lenses/mirrors, the opposite of high magnification. Mind you, if you can afford a (say) f2.8 100mm lens, you will get magnificent results.
I can actually say something because this is my wheelhouse, and I research this for a living as a photograph conservator! I would have a couple of suggestions on this.
1) In regards to aberrations, a simple way to get rid of them is to make a symmetric doublet, and for the focal length you are at, the easiest way to do it would be to get two +1 diopter reading glass blanks, which would add up to 500mm together, and then you could add a lens to bring it up to the 350 mm range using the lens makers formula. If you get your positive meniscii from surplus shed, you can get it pretty cheap, and just use PVC pipe to mount. Also will let you pick your aperture, because some of those meniscii get massive.
2) sensitivity: a good rule of thumb with these things is that water helps with speed. You are on the right track with Ware’s formula ( as a crystallography thing, his cyanomicon is a great read because of how Prussian blue works, and is free online). Arpan Mukherjee’s work using different iron salts is also good, and can be found on alternative photography .com. A final hint would be to sensitize, and dry your paper, but then humidify it using a wet blotter behind it. Wet paper gains around a spot of speed.
3) if you really want to make a project, explore science, and cry, try Lippmann plates. Gabriel Lippmann got a Nobel prize for his work, and a paper which came out just a month ago showed that the Lippmann plate is actually a multispectral resolving surface, so you can actually use the images as a tough imaging spectrometer (good luck, it will never happen because it is so finicky, but in theory, it does work)
Just learning how blueprints are made blew my mind, the way you made it into a camera is insane! This is very cool!!
So, since these were essentially negatives, and I have sometimes in the past found it difficult to 'evaluate' or 'analyze' what's in a photo from its negative, I wanted to see what inverted images would look like. Thought somebody else might find this interesting, so here's a link to imgur gallery with the photos processed (simply inverted, or inverted and desaturated to mimic black and white photography): imgur.com/a/v2c4SXv . I have to say, I really like the photo from the front of the house, especially with the blue/yellow color scheme.
fantastic!
I agree, that one is fantastic in yellow/blue!
That is really awsome, thank you
Two ideas: reduce spherical aberration by adding a "mold" behind the paper that brings it into focus everywhere (or at least along the longer side to avoid crinkles). Also you could try to use vacuum (maybe a battery powered aquarium pump?) to press the paper down.
Great content as always, keep it up!
Or solar powered, considering this camera needs a lot of light anyways. But the pump might vibrate, so better mount it seperately.
When the paper is wet it could be sandwiched in a curved mold, then a similar mold would be in the camera to tape the paper to. Then it could all be in focus
Yeah, the bending of the paper definitely gave some unintended inspiration! It might be hard to form the paper to a dome and get it flat again after. But even if you bend it over a curved ridge, that’ll reduce the aberration to only one axis.
@@wsshambaugh Indeed - crafting spherical paper isn't hard, but how do you hang it in a frame later?
Having it bent into a cylinder removes the aberration along the horizontal, longer axis
@@wsshambaugh you can fold the paper into the curved mold by making wrinkles, then after you developed, you unfold it. you are going to get some areas without development, but you get rid of the aberration. I do that to fit a flat piece of paper filter into my semi-dome coffee machine, it works.
The head lab tech at my old schools photography department would take multi month exposures with long since expired photo print paper. She'd abandon pinhole cameras hidden around the city. It was pretty cool seeing the sun tracks shift as the months past on a single photo.
_"...and also a wee bit of a tendency to light itself on fire."_
I just *HATE IT* when my camera does that...😊
You have to build a R E A L L Y B I G and bright camera flash.
an ultraviolet camera flash brighter than the sun would be terrifying
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel That's exactly why you need to build one. Don't forget your sunglasses 😎
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel sounds like a perfect collab with styropyro
@@SkaveRat Exactly. UV Pulse Lasers. Just B I G
📷 📸☀️💥 --> 🖼️ (+ ☢️🏘️🔥💀)
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel I think Oppenheimer made one in the 40's, but its never really caught on
If you didn’t know, there are special transparencies made for printing onto with an inkjet. There are some with a dry gel like layer that absorbs ink well (but washes off with water), and there are also waterproof ones that I think are just made to be particularly porous. Less smudging than using a normal transparency. To get a particularly opaque printing, it’s often necessary to print extra ink (CMY and black all at once), which of course means smudge mitigation is even more important. Big Clive’s videos introduced these transparencies to me for the purpose of making circuit boards with dry film photoresist, which is a rather similar process to your masking of cyanotype paper.
Of course, a laser printer doesn’t have those issues at all.
These are supposedly inkjet-friendly, but alas they literally never dry... I’ll get a laser printer someday just for this kind of thing - I don’t print much in the way of “real” paper xD
When I was a young lad working in a hospital, I had access to xray film stock, which is around 8 x 10 inches.
So, I built am 8 x 10 camera with a magnifying-glass lens...
When I exposed the xray film and developed it, it came out quiet well...
It's perfect for contact printing...
xray films can be exposed to smaller waves ? hum
or just that the sky is filled with xray, isn't ?
must have been so cool the picture.
X-ray film has been a favorite of the large format community for many years for its cheapness and availability. Not the best for visible light photography, but it works.
@@monad_tcp It picks up visible light too.
@@fepatton Exactly, you make due with what you have... ;-)
@@fepatton oh, that's why It's kept inside a metal casing before being put in the machine.
that makes sense. I never paid attention to that.
I truly enjoy your videos! I used to be an exchange student in physics at UCSB 2013-2014 and these videos bring me a great sense of nostalgia on top of the wounderful content. I currently work as a postdoc focusing on spectroscopy of antihydrogen at CERN, let me know if you ever have your way past one day:) As for myself, I dream that the next conference I attend is at UCSB!
What is the material of the lens? Maybe quartz lens could improve the camera, if it is not already.
I have found that most things science that is fun is directly proportional to its potential to bursting into flames. so this camera is thereby a more fun camera to use scientifically speaking.
These subscriber doubling benchmarks seem to be happening faster and faster (even though the numbers separating them are getting bigger and bigger!). Keep it up!
I’ve made similar cyanocameras by using USPS Medium Flat rate boxes, paired with a plastic fresnel-lens magnifying sheet in front, and a sheet of cyanotype paper inside the box.
With the large fresnel collector lens in front, exposures happen in about an hour and the density of image can be similar to the results seen here.
Sharpness from a Flat-Rate Cyanocamera is dependent on the quality of the fresnel; I’d say it’s comparable to a soft-focus Petzvall.
Keep the fresnel lens in the shade: this will prevent the sun’s image from focusing back of the box and lighting the whole thing on fire. :)
Dollar Tree Poster Board is the material of pioneers! :D
Don’t forget about the hot glue. So much hot glue...
Your curiosity is incredibly inspiring. Love the content, keep it up!
you could make a kind of studio with uv lights and photograph objects for a day or two
If you use the correct wavelength you could disinfect the room at the same time.
I'm so glad I found this channel. I love your energy, man.
I love home made cameras! I made one of these with a box and a magnifying glass. I didn't use a sensor, I just loved looking at the image it created with my eyes. It feels so unreal to see a lens completely transfer a view onto a sheet of paper.
8:35: Never thought I would see transistor man ever again, but here we are!
There are these lenses called f-theta lenses, that are used often in laser scanning applications. As the name suggests they have a flat focal plane, so you won't have any spherical aberrations. They do get expensive fast, but maybe you can look into how you can stack some simple lenses to achieve a similar result!
40 years ago we did this with 8x10 (inch) film negatives and the lens from a copy camera that would make 20x24 inch negatives. Then, since we worked in photo labs would print from the exposed film and make 40x60 inch prints. We also used super glossy positive paper to get a slick magazine quality instant picture, albeit backwards. We'd go out for lunch with the cameras and process them in the machines and have prints in less than an hour.
The rod technique you used was designed to make "rubdowns" of type or images that could be transferred to paper for layout by rubbing the back of the velum original. The rods had thousands of circular grooves that would evenly spread the photo solution on the velum. After 4 or 5 passes of different pigments and photo sensitive chemicals, the velum was exposed and processed.
man, this video put together so many pieces that have always been lost in my head about how cameras capture images!
I'm not ditching my DSLRs! I started my photo education in 1947 with a Brownie Flash 620; it took me 40 years to get to the stage you got to in however many minutes it took you to prepare to do this video. Now I have all these obsolete film cameras that are too nice to throw out, but they ARE just paper-weights now.
Dude, im all inn. You make great content. Love what your doing. Im very glad i found you so early and get to follow you from the start! ❤
This is fun!
Suggestion #1: Use photographic paper instead of that cyanoshite. It isn't fast, a mere ISO 3 or so, but way better than what you have now and all you need is developer (and stop?) and fix to process it. Rince it well.
Suggestion #2: Use large format film and develop it yourself and then make use of contact photos on photographic paper. Since film has way higher photosensitivity, this eases the job a lot
Suggestion #3: Drop the lense and use a pinhole instead. You can find tons of pages describing pinhole cameras, but the basics are just focal length == length between hole and film (or whatever) and aperture == focal length / diameter of pinhole. So a focal length of 200mm and a pinhole of 1mm gives you an aperture of f=1/200.
With pinhole, everything is in focus, ish, since there isn't a lens, but it'll get more blurry the larger the larger hole. It'll aso get more blurry with a smaller hole, just as it does with tiny apertures with a camera with a lens - all because of diffraction.
Good luck and happy photographing :)
I had one thought, if no one else has mentioned it. Since the cyanotype process creates a relatively high contrast image, you could try a fine screen over the medium as is used in the printing trades to prepare plates for photographic reproduction.
I've seen someone turn an entire hotel room into a giant pinhole camera. He made a pinhole using black paper on the window with a hole and covered the back wall with numbered sheets of print paper, then reversal processed and re-assembled them. I really like the idea of large, impromptu cameras.
Sometimes we fixate on details we think are core to a project. Have you considered _different_ photo media? For example you can still buy enlarging paper in silver halide, various color papers and even cyanotype. All of these could be used directly in your camera and produce really awesome looking negative prints. In the case of the cyanotype paper, you could also use some to see if it performs better than your own. You also might be able to do your own silver halide process. It won't be the cool blue and white, but it might expose faster.
I'm absolutely going to be looking at more chemistries! I chose cyanotype for this first attempt because it was really cheap and easy to coat large areas
Have you thought about deliberately curving the paper? Like instead of a flat plane you used a concave cylinder. You might get some interesting fish-eye effects with a low focal length.
Also maybe do some solarigraphy.
I actually did considerer a curved sheet to help combat the spherical aberration - didn't get to talk about that in the video. I could get the edges of the frame to look "sharper" if they curved forward towards the lens, but unfortunately I really just replaced blur with stigmation, so the edges of the image still looked pretty bad. With a faster chemistry where I could get away with a smaller aperture, I'll be all about fun tiltshift things!
Most lenses are made of materials that block the UV that will darken the print, thus it takes a long time to work. You need either fused quartz lens which pass UV, some other type of UV transparent made into a lens, a pinhole camera with no lenses or a reflecting mirror ( Newtonian) to project the image onto the paper.
The blur on the edges is called comatic aberration. You can fix it with a couple extra lenses, a Plano-convex and a Plano-concave one. I suggest talking to people that build telescopes, your aperture is large enough to fit somewhat in the same realm of imaging. Also, you can look into how tele lens are set up. You can ignore all the chromatic correction lenses and only try to mimic the coma correction, since you're imagining one wave length.
Where did you source your lens from and how transparent is it to UV?
Cheap spherical glass lens on amazon - should have checked but didn't! All my stuff is with the movers now so it'll be a while before I can test... That experiment was crossing my mind earlier today while I was contemplating the more complex aspherical lenses recommended by others here in the comments.
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Well, glass generally absorbS most UV frequencies quite a lot. I would use concave metal mirror ( Newtonian telescope style)
I’ve been researching how to make crazy shaped optics!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Mirrors would also alleviate longitudinal chromatic abberation. Your lens probably doesn't focus visible light and UV light in the same plane. The UV will focus farther from the lens than the visible light and behind the sensitive paper, if you use visible light to focus.
17:26 I have the same photo!!! "Pale blue dot".
Also at the bottom of it, I have the quote by Carl Sagan.
You're a very smart individual with a great grasp on sciencetific method and much more.
Keep up the GREAT work!!!
I think you'll like this music video:
NIGHTWISH - 'Ad Astra' - [World Land Trust Partnership] (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
th-cam.com/video/VshpPBBehxE/w-d-xo.html
@@MikkoRantalainen Why?..
@@TheTechAdmin Because that combines half the Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech with well made music and video.
First time viewer. Great video! Awesome intro! Easy easy sub.
Great video. I have been working with this process for several years and love making "in camera" cyanotypes. Something you might consider is trying "Nature Print Paper" in your camera. That is what I have ended up using for the last two years or so. I can get a great image with an 8 hour sunny day exposure.
Very cool! What kind of lens do you use that lets UV through and what cyanotype recipe to you use? classic or Ware?
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel I am using 19th century and early 20th century view cameras. I use "Nature Print Paper" as it is pre-coated cyanotype paper that is available.
This should be a MANDATORY PROJECT in all schools.
Just 1 example how so many things nowadays are being taken for granted, yet centuries of research, development and try&error went into all of those...
I have watched this video I think 3 times now, and I find it ammusing that you have, in the last 3 days, basically tippled your sub count to where you need to do the 2^15, and are half way to needing 2^16. I wish you luck on getting those done soon.
congrats on 2^16 subs!!
I’ve always used cheap glass for my contact printing frames. I have a book on alternative photographic processes and it is avid about not using acrylic.
This isn't about this video specifically, but I'm really glad I found this channel. I find myself "running out" of things to watch on TH-cam because it's terrible at recommending things to me, but luckily I got the golf ball simulation video from another coding video, and decided to check out the other videos. I'm constantly looking for channels that feel like worthy additions to the "Steve Mould, Applied Science, Stuff Made Here, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day" category, and this is definitely it.
If I lived anywhere near the same continent, I'd make my best effort to add you to my friend list. Highly intellectual and approachable character. I love your videos.
1:57
THE SACRED TEXTS
(seriously, one of the best electronics text books out there)
Your comment about the photographic paper bowing outwards and subsequent solution made me realize why old time cameras used photographic plates with the paper sandwiched between.
maybe use a massive freznel lens... since you are not going to get insane focus with the rough surface of paper, you could have way more light coming in.
I wonder whether using an imaging fresnel lens would allow you to use a significantly larger lens, allowing more light in and cutting down on exposure times, and possibly reduce the spherical abberation (though trading it with the artefacts from the fresnel ridges).
My brother and I build a 80x80cm camera last year, it is huge but a lot of fun. Ivan highly recommend the ra4 color reversal process, it takes direct color prints in camera. You need a color filter and some chemicals,but my brother is better informed than me. The color image appears in a step where you can see the inverted bw image switch to the correct colors.
congrats on 2^15 subs!
OK, I have a couple of suggestions, coming from someone who has 1. Done cyanotype, 2. Built my own 20-24 camera in the past from black foamcore, and 3. used ULF cameras for a long time...
Back when I was a kid, we did something similar to what you are doing, but we used a overhead projector to do it. You know, what I'm talking about? One of those things with a light source and you put a piece of film on it that you can draw on and then there's a mittor and lens aboe that you can aim at the screen and focus? These things a PERFECT for going the other direction. You basically need to make a black tent for the area from the lens down to the light table, and then you place the cyanotype paper on the light table (and don't turn it on, the light comes the other direction). It becomes a bit of a camera obscura, and all you need is a white piece of paper to focus and compose on before you put the cyanotype paper in there.
The lens is pretty large, and who knows what the aperture is??? But it will have some chromatic aberrations in it, so it isn't perfect, which produces some of the dreaminess that you may like (or not, of course). The exposures are likely to be much shorter because the lens is going to be reasonably fast.
If you want to try to improve the image quality and start to eliminate a lot of the artifiacts that you nay not like (towards a "perfect" image), you will need to redesign the camera to ensure that the light that is coming inside the camera but isn't part of the image on the paper is dealt with a lot better. That light is a source of FLARE. Not necessarily the lens flare that you think of from J J Abrams' movies, but a general loss of contrast in the image that will sometimes be uniformly distributed, but sometimes be concentrated on one side or another. This is in part due to the light getting in through the lens and then bouncing around inside before eventually hitting the cyanotype paper as randomized (not image-forming) light. Eliminate that, and you will have a lot more contrast in your images. I can get into why but the key to focus on is eliminating that extra light wherever possible.
Great video!
I think you’re still getting a lot of light leak through the box. You might want to double up the poster board with overlapping layers. Also, covering the lens before and after you’re taking your photo would probably help with as well. Any time the lens is open that paper is collecting light
What a fantastic video. Very interesting and enjoyable to watch.
I made a pinhole camera out of a Pringles can back in the day, very cool fisheye type pictures as the photo paper inside was curved to the inside of the can.... Much smaller aperture tho. Keep up the great work.
Oh man, you yourself are up there with these different breeds!
Great video. I've always wanted to see a cyanotype camera in action. It may be worthwhile considering curving the film plane. Also using a splash of hydrogen peroxide after washing will bring out the deep blue quicker and so give you a better idea of final contrast.
Oof I'm a little late to this to add anything worthwhile. Your exposure time isn't going to get better with your current setup, but you do need to press the "film" behind glass. I'd also recommend using finer paper - details are being lost in the "grain" of the paper texture. Seeing the blueprints in the video I'm assuming you know about the peroxide trick, which can add significant contrast.
Also dude, keep going with this! Van Dyke & Kallitype are both extremely similar to the cyanotype and may be a bit more sensitive (citation needed).
There's also the Platinum/palladium option which you can buy pre-mixed (for a price!!) and use to make a negative with the same method.
I love this stuff, and would _love_ to see more content about it.
Suggestion for the next revision. Mold paper into a spherical shape to address the focus issue created by the large aperture. Would make for cool wall art also! Can’t wait to see the next version!
I took screenshots of your subcount separated by like 10 mins. 300 more subs. GG man.
I think some blinders on the outside of the lens would go a long way to help the whole trying to start itself on fire thing. Like what you see on broadcast cameras to block stray light
absolutely - all my regular camera lenses have hoods - I just wasn't sure how massive of a hood I would need here (and what angle I could place it at to not vignette) and didn't realize I'd ever be shooting south with it... shoulda thought that one through
Since it uses UV light to create an image, could you use something like Wood's glass since Acrylic isn't very UV transparent?
It's opaque to transparent light, but you could slide it in after you focused your camera
Can you help reduce the spherical aberration by using an aspheric lens?
Or maybe you could purposefully bow the paper by using a jig?
Love the video as always!
So this might be a whole new project but could you capture the image on thermal paper and use a mirror to transfer the image onto cyanotype? It might speed up your development time, plus it would allow you to print a "positive" onto the cyanotype, in addition to allowing you to print a thermally captured image onto UV sensitive paper (which just kinda sounds cool).
and its already time for 2^15, congrats!
One ways that you could potentially fix the aberrations is by adding a second lense to get the light rays to be parallel when they hit they sheet of paper. A flexible lense (like one of those plastic fresnel lenses) could work.
Curve the back along the horizontal/long axis to (better) match the focal plane curve caused by the lens, to achieve focus over a wider area of the paper. This curve will also insure that the paper will stay in contact with the backing plate. Use a cardboard strip around the lens about 25mm in width that shades the top half of the lens, like an awning.
You could of course decrease your exposure time by using a huge (250-300mm) lens to gather 5-6x more light and have that focus on your 55mm lens: forming a telescope setting, allowing for double the change for being out of focus.
Interesting video, I've been wanting to do similar for ages. Have you thought about doing a daguerrotype image on glass, and then taking a blueprint from that? It's been a while since I looked at it, but I think you would have a non-inverted image as a result.
isn't that the one that requires fuming mercury? I think that's why i avoided it xD I'll absolutely be looking into more chemistries though - this was too fun
After the introduction I was kind of expecting you to somehow take the picture three times with R,G,B color filters before the lens and paint over with the cyano, magenta and yellow to get the a colored picture, but i guess that is unfeasible
Great work!
Love your enthusiasm!
would using a fronel lense be better? I don't know the actual name. the thin flexible lenses that DIYperks used to build his HD projector
A few suggestions: 1) did you test the lens for UV transmission in the same way you tested the acrylic? if it fails find another lens. 2) Hold the paper flat using vacuum against a 3/32" acrylic "back board", that you sanded, or lightly sand blasted to make it a "ground glass" focusing screen. By mounting it in a sturdy wood frame with 3 bars behind it spaced about an inch back, and 9 small (#4 of #6) 2" long flat head screws, you could "dish" it to match the curvature of the lens's image field. For a vacuum pump, perhaps one of those sold to suck the air out of a home freezer bags that is powered by 2 AA batteries, and after 15 seconds or so, run it on just 1.5 volts perhaps via a voltage reducer and a 12 V car battery, or a bunch of "D" cells, wired in parallel. Another option is a small home aquarium air pump in a sealed "Coffee can" with the outlet hose to air, and the "coffee can" being in vacuum, would require 120 VAC, although I think that there are some made that run on batteries for people with expensive fish in case of power outages.
One thing you could do to speed up the exposure time is to use photographic print paper which I vaguely remember has different rates of reaction to a light source.
This would give you two options for light sensitive medium where both are utilized dependent on aim.
Applied Science had a video about photolithography, and in that they used a vaccum to hold the film against a backplate -- maybe you could do a similar thing to avoid having to use tape?
Have you considered adding compound or macro lenses? Maybe apply the reactant on the paper in multiple layers? Try applying the reactant in a spray using an airbrush?
Congratulations on so many interesting comments. I have not yet read them all. But I do know that a "lens hood" aka "lens shade" will give you two advantageous improvements by preventing sunlight from directly hitting the lens. First, it will reduce flare and glare, thus improving image contrast. Second, it will greatly reduce the chances of combustion.
And a lens hood is as simple as rolled up black paper.
Make a sun shade in front of the lens.
If you can find one, the lens from a scanner or photocopier, the old school ones that didn't use a scanner bar, work surprisingly well. You could of course make actual silver emulsion a la wet plate method. That is fun to do.
You could theoretically have the paper resting concave, inside the aperture, to make up for the lack of focus that is around the center of the image.
You could add a lens hood to reduce the chance of sunlight coming directly through the lens and starting a fire. You might also try getting some older glass from a recycler that does not have UV resistance (whether from additives or via film coating) to hold down the print. _Mattieu Stern_ has some great videos on adapting antique lenses which is another great option for exploring different optical solutions. Thanks for sharing your journey.
I see that Mattieu is in the comments so you look all set. 👍
You could compensate for some of that spherical aberration by using a curved panel to mount the paper on. It would give you a band in the middle that's in focus. You just have to match the curvature of the lens adjusted for focal length. You could do a spherical sector but getting paper to conform to that would be difficult.
... why didnt he use glass instead of acrylic? glass is transparent to uv right?
Absolutely wicked graphics!
You can actually sell this. People who shoot UFO pics will buy.
Or Bigfoot.
This may now be my favorite camera as well. Thank you for sharing such a wonderful experiment.
What material is your lens made of? Glass is pretty opaque to UV below 400nm, quartz/fused silica would probably go a LONG way to reducing exposure time. UV transparent (UVT) acrylics also do exist, though UV filtering acrylic is much more common
Hey there buddy, hope you’re doing OK
been checking your channel often and re-watching old videos. So exciting to see someone like you make videos, and I hope you make more soon. Hope everything is going well
Literally editing three today. Schedules are a mess I guess!
It would be cool to set it up for a camera shot but also place a print slide on the paper. You could essentially photoshop in the silhouette a person using the slide against the backdrop of scenery or something. I used to play around with these blue print sheets as a kid. I must have gone through a pack of 50 pages in a week when I first got them. I love simple kits like that. It was more fun than my gameboy honestly, because I had to think about what I wanted to expose next and how to create cool prints.
You could try glass instead of acrylic to keep the paper in place.
I was recently thinking of doing this exact process, but with a 35mm film camera; call it a CSLR. Your bespoke setup looks like a 500mm f/5.6; so perhaps using a 50mm f/1.8 will give at least 3 f-stops better performance and also remove the optical aberrations of a single-lens setup. Instead of an 8 hour exposure, I can hope for better than 2-hours.
The drawback is obviously that the final print will be, at best, a ~45mm circular print, but I'll take it.
You should make a photo emulsion! Maybe gelatin based like silver halide film, spread on transparency sheets or glass. Then you could make contact prints.
7:39 if you wrote it in mirror text, then flipped it so the ink side is touching the paper, you'd get a more crisp image.
8:15 If you print the graphic mirrored and expose it with the ink side down, that will increase the fidelity of your exposure.
Basically, the light leaks under the graphic through the plastic carrier. The thickness of the transparency causes the "smudging", blurring the shadow as it's floating above the paper.
I'm a graphic artist. I used to expose metal plates for pad printing.
I used to send my graphics to a shop that created masks using a photo process.
I'd send the graphic flipped (mirror) so that when I apply the film as a mask, the ink side would be the side touching the masking gel.
This would give me higher resolution crisp graphics during exposure.
I remember doing something like that when someone needed durable barcodes that could be scanned hundreds of times a day without getting rubbed off the page. I discovered the way to do it was to print it backward on transparency plastic, and then flip it over so they scanned the back. The toner didn't rub off but eventually the plastic got too scratched up and scattered the laser. It worked a lot longer than the old method though, and at a reasonable cost.
These videos should be getting millions of views !
Try using Vinegar in the developing solution to alter the acidity, this can reduce the needed exposure times by half. Your paper quality and surface seems to be rather important for quality and lifespan of the print.
In my book... you're already rivalling Applied Science and Breaking Taps with your content and presentation. Not to downplay their videos in any way. Just a sincere compliment.