Because sharp lenses are boring.

 

Today's lenses are so perfect, so sharp and devoid of character that they are quite frankly, boring. Don't you long for some softness in your images, chromatic aberration's colorful charm, the cheerful tones of lens flaring? If you do, I got a treat for you: the "blurromatic" lens.
It occurred to me, that you can easily take and old discarded lens and a simple body cap and combine them to  make a custom lens. One could could say the blurromatic is the Frankenstein of DSLR lenses.

 A Body Cap- Ingredient #1

Visit a local thrift store and you can most assuredly find tons of discarded film cameras and old slide projectors. For this project, I used a lens extracted from an $8 slide projector. Some gluing and drilling later, I had the following contraption ready:

If you want to get fancy, you can add a simple twist cap to add "manual focus" to your lens. However, since this lens is so blurry, it hardly matters where you focus and so I didn't. Focusing with this lens is more an act of faith than a photographic skill. No focus control, no aperture control... ah the freedom!

results

And there you have it, some blurry pictures for your enjoyment.

 

 Front Door
Canon T1i with Blurromatic wide-open (not that I had a choice)

 

Downtown Pedestrian

 

Downtown Runner

I must confess the reactions to the work produced with the new lens have been mixed, ranging from: "I love the original idea" heard at a local Meetup group, to a candid:  "I thought I had to get my eyes checked" from a colleague at work. Like any imperfect, non-boring character, the blurromatic is loved by some and hated by others, but it's normally not ignored... which is more than I can say about my perfect prime lenses.

Comments, questions, suggestions? You can reach me at: contact (at sign) paulorenato (dot) com

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