Check out this completed eBay listing for a 1800mm f/16 lens with a 2640mm image circle. Pictures on eBay. Holy shit!

Today Leica announced a new range of M-mount rangefinder lenses, called Summarit. They will be available in focal lengths of 35mm, 50mm, 75mm, and 90mm—all f/2.5 and coded for the M8—from the end of November, 2007 forward. Leica’s press release: The new class of Leica precision lenses It is the lenses on which the legend [...]

  Also check out Canon’s lens manufacturing video. It’s worth watching both as they use different processes.

Someone figured out how to fold a 35mm effictive focal length lens into 5mm! Here’s the abstract of the paper Ultrathin cameras using annular folded optics, by Eric J. Tremblay, Ronald A. Stack, Rick L. Morrison, and Joseph E. Ford, from the Feb 2007 issue of Applied Optics: We present a reflective multiple-fold approach to [...]

Now the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM Lens enters the market. Being a prime Canon L Series Lens, the Canon 50 f/1.2 far exceeds all existing Canon 50mm lenses in nearly all aspects – including three negative ones: size, weight and price. Since Canon already has a 50mm f/1.4 lens, they would not release [...]

Photographer Joe Reifer wrote a nice review of the new Lensbaby G3 selective focus SLR lens. Check it out at The Online Photographer.

Fucking hell! After over a year of searching, I finally found a Pinkham & Smith Visual Quality No. 2 Series IV soft focus lens! This was a revered pictorial lens and the inspiration for the Cooke PS945. I think it’ll be perfect for a portrait series I’ve been planning. I’ll have to get the shutter [...]

There’s now a growing database of Leica’s lens codes for use on the M8. Why pay $120 and wait 6–8 weeks to have Leica code your lenses when you can do it yourself with a marker? Check out this how-to by Mike Prevette on the Leica user forums for details. Previous posts on the subject: [...]

As I posted previously [1, 2], Leica have a coding scheme for their lenses so that the new digital M8 body can automatically identify the mounted lens. It turns out that you can use a marker to code the lenses rather than paying Leica US $120 per lens for six dots of paint. You can [...]

Flickr member bricolage.108 hacked a 35mm trashcam into a double-sided lens/pinhole monster. He writes: If using a normal film roll this camera takes redscaled ["redscale" is where you shoot the film backwards, so the light gets filtered through the antihalation layers before hitting the emulsion and turns the image red/orange or yellow, depending on the [...]