Back in 1880, James Garfield was elected president of the United States and Thomas Edison was alive and tinkering in his Menlo Park lab. That’s also the year also when this camera lens was made.
This year, the seemingly ancient lens helped to shoot this remarkably good-looking YouTube video. As part of a Weird Lens Challenge, French photographer Mathieu Stern took the a 136-year-old metallic lens from an old large format camera and mounted it onto his twenty-first century Sony A7II. “The results are amazing,” Stern writes on his blog. “But it also gives some strange lens flares and light leaks that are pretty dreamy (some would say it’s horrible).”
Everything looks pretty dang great through the century-old lens, though it’s worth giving the modern sensor in the Sony camera some credit. The juxtaposition of old and new technology shows how far we’ve come in some respects and how some inventions are wonderfully timeless. Check out the whole video below.
[Mathieu Stern via PetaPixel]
GIF via Mathieu Stern YouTube