How to Use a Magnifying Glass as a Camera Lens and Get Unique Photos and Footage

If you fancy a fun DIY project, how about converting an old magnifying glass into a lens — complete with focusing — for your camera, suitable for both photography and video? Here’s how to do it.

Sean at FotodioX has put together a short video that explains how to rig a couple of bits of gear together to give yourself a fun setup that creates quite an interesting effect. As with many such ideas, some gaffer tape is a fundamental ingredient.

You might recall that earlier this year, FotodioX released the RhinoCam Vertex, an intriguing and innovative piece of kit that allows you to adapt medium format lenses onto a full frame camera, rotating the lens to grab different sections of the image circle to create four images that are then stitched together. The resulting photograph is effectively a medium format image shot on a medium format lens, but on a full frame camera.

Deploying the bellows as shown in this video can allow you to adapt other glass, such as old projector lenses. If the image circle is larger than full frame, you can also incorporate the RhinoCam Vertex as well, creating an even bigger rig, as explained in this video.

What would you shoot with this setup? Let us know in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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