Building a DIY Digital Movie Camera With Vintage Lenses

Technology that powers smartphone cameras has steadily improved. You can shoot video with smart phone camera, but if you want to get authentic film look you need to think how you could have the visuals that the traditional film camera lenses gives. My eariler posting  Video and movie shooting with a smartphone told about a feature film shot on a smartphone and how old film camera optics was adapted to work with N8 smart phone.

Now here is another film camera optics adaptation story. Building a DIY Digital Movie Camera With Vintage Lenses article tells how you can capture the 8-mm film look of yesteryear with a Raspberry Pi camera. What if you used the lens of a 1950s 8-mm camera and a Raspberry Pi equipped with an imaging module to create a digital film camera?Pi’s digital camera module (US $25) is essentially a repurposed smartphone camera. By lucky coincidence, the area of the camera module’s sensor and an 8-mm film frame are nearly a perfect match – so you can remove original optics and replace them with 8-mm camera optics. The standard Raspberry Pi camera utilities, raspistill and raspivid, were used to control the camera.