 This month I got an opportunity to be one of the many featured creators at William Osmond's OpenSauce in San Francisco. It was an amazing experience to get to meet some of my fans in person, as well as getting to hang out with all the other creators that were there. Part of the event was a creator museum, which allowed all of the creators to show off some of their projects. But this left me a little stumped on what I should bring myself. A lot of my projects lately have been getting bigger and bigger, not very travel friendly. And besides that, a lot of my videos are above the process and not so much the final results. So I'm not sure how interested people would be in seeing this very crooked 2x4 that I've milled by hand, and my little jar of off-white sugar, or a tiny little letter opener that I smelted from iron ore over several days. But then I thought about the camera project that I started several years ago, and it's gotten a little sidetracked from with the whole reset series. But that's definitely one of my favorite projects I think as a video creator actually making my own camera is very meta and very close to home I think. And with that camera project, the last one I did was making a camera lens, which was probably one of the most challenging projects I've done. And I think it's actually pretty impressive the results I did get. Although looking back at it, I feel like I really undersold it, and I just kind of had a couple shots of the image projected onto some grainy glass. I've always kind of felt like I could get a bunch better results, just a little bit more work. So I thought this would make an interesting opportunity to re-approach this project, fix some of the issues, and produce a really interesting interactive experience for any fans who are able to make it to open sauce. My camera lens project was probably one of the biggest and most challenging projects I've undertaken. Because it not only is the final result of the long-running challenge I faced in trying to make optically clear glass, something that took countless attempts, collaborations, and mineral gathering trips to finally find a working solution. While making glass is actually kind of easy, making optically clear glass takes a lot more than just heating sand. Spoiler, borax is a pretty incredible flux that can lower glass's melting point drastically, and combined with a few other techniques I learned along the way, finally allowed me to make clear glass. But even with clear glass, that was just the first step in making a working camera lens. Getting some help with the design, three pieces of glass need to be manually ground to specific curvatures, using custom made metal molds with the inverse of the curvature. These were used to slowly grind down the lenses into the exact shape using an abrasive powder, and then slowly worked it up into a clear polish. The end result was, I would say, success, but I feel like it's a little bit underwhelming. So let's revisit this project and see if I can make some improvements. So the first improvement I'm going to make is an actual image sensor. The eventual goal for this is to make my own film, but that is the kind of last step and the most challenging of the process that's been a little bit out of reach so far. But for now, I want to be able to instantly view my image both so people at OpenSauce can instantly review that photo and have a copy of it, but also so I can instantly review my own image quality as I tweak and improve the lens and other parts of the camera. The image sensor is basically going to take the place of the film, and if you're familiar with the camera, the image is basically projected onto the back of it. This is basically the camera obscura, a phenomenon that is the basis of a camera. We did a whole thing when we built the first pinhole camera. But then that image is then reacted to on a photosensitive plane that records the image as film. But for digital purposes, the process is pretty much exactly the same. It's just a digital sensor that records the image. But the challenge is that most digital cameras actually have really tiny sensors. My camera is actually large format as most early forms of camera were. But today's modern cameras have tiny sensors that are just little itty bitty things inside here. They do, however, make large sensors to convert large format cameras, but they're pretty expensive. A little bit out of budget for this. However, I did find a cheaper alternative, which is to take a photo scanner and attach it to the back of the camera and scan the ground glass plane, basically making a large format camera sensor. So using some duct tape and a box, I was able to rig up a pretty simple camera here with a lens, do some test batches with a full size scanner. The results are actually pretty promising. So I think this is going to work. The problem is, the scanner is pretty slow. So for somebody to take the photo with it, you basically have to stand still while it scans the entire thing. When really it only needs a small section of it. Then I chose the scanner because it has a supposed scan to cloud feature. So I was hoping I wouldn't have to actually plug this to a computer and I could just have this connected to the Wi-Fi, press the button, scans it online, and then it can get published. However, it doesn't actually seem to work that way. You still have to have it connected to a computer apparently for it to even turn on. So that was a little disappointing. So then I found that there's a scanner that's basically exact size that I need. This is like a very quick document scanner for like getting your ID and whatnot scanned very quickly. It has the advantage that it has a very small scan area and can do it very quickly. It allows you to basically scan the photo a little bit quicker. It's still pretty slow though, but this had some weird artifacts with like a line. The result was just not that good. I'm definitely managing to get the results, but for making something that's easy to use on site at the event is not quite working out because both of these have to be plugged into some form of computer. So then I was going down a round hole possibly using a Raspberry Pi, and then I realized, I mean what is a scanner? I was just taking an image or document. So ultimately the best result I found was to put a camera pointed towards the ground glass where the image is being projected onto by the lens and then just take an image using that. Basically it's a scanner and that's connected to the Raspberry Pi. We have it hooked up to just be a little program so that people can just press the button, get a photo, we'll get a preview, they'll take it, upload it to Instagram. And this has a lot of advantages. It's a lot smaller, it's quicker. You can actually do a live preview. This is basically going to be a sensor and then we're just going to put the ground glass on top. And previously I've used actual ground glass, but that tends to leave a lot of artifacts because it's not consistently diffused. Apparently a good source of a diffuse screen is from an old LCD screen, which I happen to have a busted one that's been sitting around. It should offer a nice, finely grained, consistently diffused image that will be projected on here from the camera obscura. Hopefully give us a much better image. One more thing that can improve the image is the addition of a Fresnel lens. This is basically a magnifying glass and this should hopefully kind of even out the amount of light that hits our sensor here and a little bit more consistent of an image. Might get some texturing from it. We'll see how well that impacts it. But first, thank you to BetterHelp for sponsoring this video. 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Oh yeah, and you'll also get 10% off your first month when you click that link below. Probably one of the most obvious flaws with the camera lens, at least visually, is that the outer element ended up cracking. Unfortunately, in the very final stages of finishing this up after hours of labor, it ended up flying off of the little lathe that we put together and shattered into several pieces. I was able to glue it back together and finish polishing it, and the result is actually surprisingly better than you would expect. At this point, I can't see the artifacts of the cracks. A crack in the outer element isn't the most noticeable. So I'm going to try carbon shield repair. Got right here, and it's a resin that has the same refractive index as glass. So it fills the crack, and makes it pretty much invisible. I think we can at least reduce some of this crackage, and hopefully when I have a little bit more time, I can redo this lens and make a brand new one that isn't cracked at all. It didn't end up making too big of an impact because the crack had already been glued together and the resin couldn't get all the way in. I probably could have gotten a better result if I broke it apart again and cleared up the old glue, but I didn't really want to risk making things worse on accident. We have the sensor rigged up with the ground glass, and then we have our lenses here, kind of with the temporary testing mount here. This is basically a little rudimentary camera now for testing. But notice I'm only using the inner two lenses, and that's kind of the nice thing about this lens of the three elements. You can actually ditch the third one and still use it. So I'm just going to test these first two lenses and get that to a clear image, and putting that up with our new setup. I feel like we've already gotten a pretty clear image I tested with and without the Fresnel lens. It's not a huge difference, but the Fresnel definitely brightens it up at least a little bit on the edges. We have some very heavy vignetting. I think if we can get the last lens on there, that will improve it. Everything looks pretty clear so far, just visually. There's no, there's a few scratches and smudges that can be cleaned off pretty easily, but for the most part it looks pretty clear. Kind of surprising how blurry the image comes out, although it is a lot better already, but I think we just need to get it that final polish. So previously I just used serum oxide and some stuff that Glassboard given us. I don't really know what like particle size it was, so I bought some more with some very specific sizes and we have optical grade, and I think that's probably gonna be hopefully what brings us to a whole new sharpness, just the extra polish with an even finer grit. We might be able to remove some of the fuzziness, the kind of compounds between all the lenses, because with this there's one, two, three, four, five, six different layers of glass that need to all be crystal clearly polished. Polish up these inner ones, see if we can get any major improvement, and then move on to the large one, and hopefully we can get some crystal clear photos. I ended up not taking the best reference photos for before and after, but I was able to notice a pretty decent improvement to the image quality and got a much sharper image, although still not quite perfect. One other shortcoming of my lens that I made before was the extra housing of it, which ended up casting out of copper, which proved to be pretty big difficulty, and wound up with this hulking seven pound lens that is telephoto, but somehow was supposed to be attached to the camera at this point, where seven pounds to rip it off. This thing, I never really found practical way to use it besides just like mounting it on its own stand in front of the camera. I think just overall it was not the best design for this option. So I ended up looking at some other historical lenses that are also made out of brass, and found some interesting examples that look really cool, and one thing I noted is that they tended to have the largest part of the housing is what's attached to the camera, and then the inner parts are what zooms out and in. So I took that design and adjusted it to fit my lenses, and came up with a little bit of a prototype that I could 3D print and see if it would work. Eventually I wanted to cast us an actual brass, but for now I just printed it in 3D filament brass just because I need to have it ready in time for open sauce. I used the actual bellows from the previous pinhole camera that I made before, and that covered the area around it and everything. I had everything together and was just about ready to do one final test before I pack up and head out, and the SD card stopped working. That's the whole thing with Raspberry Pis is it doesn't take much and you're gonna corrupt your SD card. So now I have a fresh install, and after redo all of my programming and customization, so that's fun. That's a lot of fun. Hopefully get all that done before my flight, otherwise I'm going to be doing that on location. Yeah, I got it all set up, otherwise you press the button, takes your photo, uploads it to Instagram, and I'm very frustrated that it looks like some little thing could very easily go wrong and derail all of this effort. If it goes crossed, nothing else goes wrong. I fully intended to get more footage of the camera up and running at open sauce, but there was just so much going on at the whole event. I didn't end up getting too much besides a couple creeper shots from when I was secretly watching people from above. I actually ended up working out. I had a close call when I was just before I left, I couldn't get the camera on the Raspberry Pi to even connect, and I thought I'll always be much lost. I wasted all my time trying to put this together, but I ended up just replacing the ribbon and had it up and running. I did end up having to program it while I was there and everything, but it actually ended up working out pretty well. The only real issue was the uploading process and then I ran into a little bit of an issue, getting the photos to actually post on Instagram like my original plan was, but did end up getting all the photos. In the end, I had over 500 people press the button and take their photo. I thought that was pretty cool to offer people the opportunity to actually use one of the things I made and I think a little bit better result than if I'd say brought a sword. The end result of the lens and all these improvements is I think pretty drastic. It's still kind of blurry, can't seem to get super crisp. The polishing of it did seem to make a pretty big difference. Possibly you could just keep doing that more and more, but there did seem to be some diminishing return as I continued to polish it. So beyond that, I'm not entirely sure why it isn't any crisper than it is. Compared to the image that I had before in my previous video, I think it's pretty significant improvement. So in that regard, I actually feel pretty satisfied with the result. I think we are able to get images where I can actually see a person and see their face and recognize them. Definitely steal some room for improvement, but I think it's been a great opportunity to go back, revisit this project and make some improvements and get kind of reacquainted with it. I do have to say this brought a bit of a reminder of just the major headache. This camera lens project was and just trying to revisit it and do all of this, especially under tight deadline, has been not not the most fun. I'm really hoping to get into actually making the film. Hopefully soon there are some significant obstacles that need to be overcome before that, but I really would like to do the last step of this project and make a fully working camera. So hopefully I can get to that soon. Thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon. Without Gio, this wouldn't be possible. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.