Digi Swap

Back in January, we heard about the Digi Swap. It’s essentially a depth-of-field adapter that parks on the back of your 35mm film camera and lets you use your smartphone to actually take the shot instead of using film. But because it’s a DoF adapter, you still retain that 35mm format depth of field. It’s a bit like the Letus DoF adapter that let you use Nikon F mount lenses on the Sony PMW-EX3 way back when. Except, for your film camera and your phone.

The big difference between this and the Letus adapter, though, is that other than the ISO (which is set in the app), you’re using the controls from your camera to expose your scene and shoot your photos. Aperture and shutter speed are both controlled by your camera’s settings, not the phone. And now, finally, it’s available on Kickstarter (hence the “sort of” in the title).

Well, we never really did see “digital film” come to fruition, but this might be the next best thing to let you use your film cameras digitally – sort of. It’s called the Digi Swap and it’s an attachment that allows you to connect your iPhone to the back of your camera and see through its lens. They’ve posted a couple of videos to show how it works and the kind of results you can expect.

But essentially you remove the back from your camera, connect the Digi Swap, which features a built-in focusing screen for the lens to project on and a macro lens allowing your iPhone’s camera to focus on it, and then fire up the app. What makes it special, though, is that the only setting on the app is the ISO. It monitors your actual camera’s shutter for shutter speed and the aperture is defined by your lens, so you just shoot your camera as you normally would.