Lens Tinkering - Do It Yourself Lenses - Homemade Lenses

Some people like to make their own lenses.
Partly for the fun of it, or to learn someting about optics, or to create lenses with uncommon imaging behavior.
Or to make lenses that are commercial not available, or to expensive.

Very often the homemade lenses have image qualities (in terms of sharpness, contrast, edge quality) that are far away from normal photographic lenses. But it is possible to make lenses that have high enough image quality - at least like lenses with same focal length and f-stop made in the 1980´s.

Common Ways

Common ways are to use an positive achromat - a lens made of two lenses that are for example glued together with Canada Balm or UV glue - and use those stopped down to for example f/8 for a good image quality, or use it wideopen for dreamy effects.
Some try to use an positive achromat and a negative lens to form a tele-photo lens. But mostly the color correction is very bad. The image aberrations from the first lens or lens group is enlarged by the negative lens. Normal commercial available tele lenses have highly corrected elements in the front, for example extraordinary low dispersion glass.

Triplet Use For Long Focal Length Lens

To avoid this enlargement of the front element aberrations I went the other way round: I took long focal length lenses, and reduced their focal length. So I reduce a part of the aberrations.
I use most times projection lenses as front element, and for example as second element too. Or I take a normal photographic lens, or a graphic work copy lens as second element.
These two positive lenses together form a lens with shorter focal length - and in case the setup is correct, the lens has a faster f-stop.

Crucial is to use lenses with a long distance between their last element or housing, and their focus - cause in combination the focus plane moves towards the fast lens. So with a normal 24x36mm (D)SLR lens as second lens, only near field images are possible.
And this is where nearly every photographers knows my setup: A CloseUp lens in front of a normal taking lens works with the same optical principle like this DIY lens setup - two positive lenses combined!

Why I use triplets as front lenses?
They are quite good corrected, they are relative cheap available in larger diameter, they have longer focal lengths.
In contrast condensor lenses from enlargers have short focal lenghts, and so one gets sometimes no room for a second lens group for reducing the focal length - and their aberrations are big.

A lot of projection lenses are triplets, useful are for example slide projection lenses and epidiascope lenses. Some of these lenses have no use today, so this is quite a good upcycling.

What Image Quality Is Possible with DIY Lenses?

Small Depth Of Field animal portrait

Flower image made with my ~150mm f/1.2 lens

These images were made with a Canon EOS 5D DSLR camera and my self made ~150mm f/1.2 lens. This lens has a no infinity focus - and no variable focus. Focusing is done with extension tubes.
Cameras with short register distance - like the Sony Alpha 7 - are preferable.

How Easy Is It?

Not that easy from the first start.
I bought more than 60 lenses, and had some other lenses for the first tests. One needs lenses with much distance between lens and focus point - lack of distance results in lenses that are not capable for larger distances. Additional the diameter of the second lens has to match to the distance where it is - otherwise one loose light (bigger f-stop, more depth of field). To avoid this I made a tool to measure the entrance pupil of my lenses.
And last but not least: Not all lens combinations result in good images!

With these first few hints here it should be a bit easier.

Does This Tinkeing Create Fine Lenses?

It depends - at the moment I mainly use hot-glue, not my small lathe.
So the lenses are ugly - for me function is much more important than form :-)

Ugly but fast lens


If you like to tinker, or repair your own photographic tools, visit my Photo DIY Directory, and my other own tinkering work.