Videos

What's it like to use a strange plastic camera lens from 1950 on a modern mirrorless camera? That's the subject of this latest "Weird Lens Challenge" video from photographer Mathieu Stern. 

In this short video experiment, embedded below, Stern takes a Photax camera (an inexpensive plastic model manufactured in the 1950s) and removes the back half of it, leaving just the front (with the lens) intact. Using two rubber bands, Stern easily (and safely) mounts the old lens over his modern Sony A7 II mirrorless camera—stacking the lenses to take advantage of the unique qualities the Photax has to offer.

The video Stern captured with the Photax’s lens is remarkably good, providing a beautifully soft and romantic quality to the sample video he created.

See another video he shot where he captured "bokeh madness" using a Russian 85mm f/2 lens here. And here's the first Weird Lens Challenge clip which showed what happens when you put a 105-year-old lens on a mirrorless camera.