Phoblography.: Experimental Photography

After looking for other home made distortion techniques online I've come across something called 'peephole photography', happily it's not as perverted as it sounds(!)

This type of photography is basically fish eye lens photography on a budget. You take an ordinary peephole that you typically have in a front door, create a lens-friendly holder that won't scratch, and simply fasten it over your normal camera lens.

These peep hole lenses can come in a variety of angles of view, usually 160 or 180 degrees, but they can be more or less. This extra wide angle and causes curving and bulging distortions to objects close to the lens or near to the edge of the view.

The quality of the lens and its state of wear and tear will also have an effect on the images produced.

This page on alternativephotography.com is a short article about peephole lenses and their qualities, and below are some images by the writer of said article:

She writes: "For ten years, I’d been playing with a peephole myself, creating magical floating worlds hanging in empty space, bathed in halos from their own light. The images were, by choice of aperture, not completely sharp, but there were details in the image that were brought in sharp relief with almost crystal clarity. Objects at the sides warped and swirled around the edges. Each halo was unique, like the fingerprint of the image within."

Here is a video tutorial about making a peephole attachment for your camera:

http://lifehacker.com/5920205/turn-a-door-peephole-into-a-fisheye-camera-lens

I have watched the video and will be making my own style of fitting to adapt to my camera.

UPDATE 4/10/13

I have bought a 200 degree peephole for £2.45 online that should arrive in a couple of weeks, and I have bought a 180 degree peephole from a local hardware shop for £4.50.

To attach my 180 peephole to the lens I first put it through a block of polystyrene (to protect the lens) with a hole in the middle, held on to the camera by two elastic bands. This presented two problems, the first being that the elastic bands held the polystyrene to tight it was impossible to turn the focus ring by hand or with autofocus; the second being that they also made it impossible to change the focal length as the bands always pulled the lens back in so I would have to continuously hold the lens barrel. This was annoying.

To bypass this problem I drilled a hole in the middle of a spare lens cap and glued the cap and peephole together. I can now place the lens cap on the camera and not have any movement of the lens restricted.