One of my favorite series of detective novels are the Bernie Gunther stories written by Philip Kerr. Bernie is a policeman in Berlin and the central character in these film noir-like novels. In the early novels he's solving murders while coming to grips with the rise of the Nazis whom he absolutely loathes in pre-war Germany. Mid-series novels have him actually conscripted into the SS that he hates so much because the SS absorbed the Berlin criminal police deprtment. Later

I've done a bit of stereo photography, both digital with a Fuji W3, as well as film-based with a 35mm David White Realist and a medium format Sputnik. But I had always pondered on building my own stereo camera. When thinking about how to do this project, I had several parameters that needed to be considered: Build it out of components or cameras I had readily available and at low cost Build it for the optimal stereo inter-ocular distance of around 65mm (the distance a human'

Browsing the internet for photography related DIY projects, I found some articles on making your own lens, so I decided to try it. I had an old magnifying glass sitting around with a lens that was about 50mm in diameter. I cut off the plastic handle of the magnifying glass with a hack saw and filed off the rough edge. Now I needed a way to mount it to a camera (first project was a Fuji X-E2) and some sort of tube that would extend it to the right focal length. Maybe a tube wi

April 30 is Pinhole Camera Day across the globe. Being a member of the Argus Collectors Group, I wanted to make myself an Argus-based pinhole camera. See my previous post on my semi-successful attempt at an Argus A2B-based pinhole camera last year. This year, I started with an attempt to use an Argus C3 Matchmatic as the base for my pinhole camera. On all attempts I used a .4mm pinhole I got from Skink which yields an optimal focus length of 90mm and speed of f/256. This is