How To Give An Old Nifty-Fifty A New Life

It was almost a year ago that Maciej Pietuszynski shared a quick and dirty tutorial on creating a tilt lens from an old Nifty-Fifty and a shower head. Surprisingly, the images were spectacular. It was a pleasure to learn that he made a fuller tutorial for our How I Took It contest.

A lot of us making a tilt lenses for dSLRs are using using medium format lenses. Not many people know that full frame lenses will do the trick too.

I’ve been modding lenses for some time now, and so far I’m not bored with it.

Why using full frame lenses? – simply because of the bokeh – at apertures lower than 2.8 is the bokeh is just incredibly delicious and I can not stop myself from shooting with this modified lenses.

Check my pictorial how I transform my old and lovely Pentacon 50mm f1.8 to a rubbery, tilty piece of glass.

Let’s hook them together! (pictorial shoot with mobile via instagram)

Dismantle the lens [or undress the glass in translation by google ;)]

Naked lens, time to strip the shower head

Bit of cutting with a handsaw to get proper size…

…like this

Some cosmetic work and gluing parts together

Almost there…

…but now the hardest stage of the work…

…How I Did It -hard to explain but I will try to explain it somehow so…

…magic light of the Full Moon under the influence and power of Mighty Unicorn gave me the strength to do it

Every self-respecting handyman can’t forget using cable ties

…and finally

It’s Alive!!!

Check out Maciej Pietuszynski flickr set for more images from this shower lens.