Turn an Old Kit Lens Into a Macro Lens by Removing the Front Element

Turn an Old Kit Lens Into a Macro Lens by Removing the Front Element:

If you have an old plastic kit lenses lying around, something that you are not using for anything serious, you can give it a new life as a macro lens by removing the front element.



Here I have an old Canon 38-76mm lens. You can find these in eBay, second-hand stores, etc. The process may not be identical for other kit lenses, but should be similar.

Use a small flathead screwdriver to remove the plastic ring that is glued onto the front. Be careful not to tear or break it.

You’ll find tiny crosshead screws under the ring. They may be really tight. The cheapest tools won’t work here. Use a good, hardened, exact-fit screwdriver and keep it firmly in place, otherwise you may ruin the heads and then you won’t be able to remove the front element without breaking things. Try not to scratch the lens.

Pull the front element out. Now you have an odd-looking but fairly decent macro lens! Attach it normally to the camera (not in reverse; no adapters needed).

Keep the parts so you can put everything back together later if you ever get tired of using it as a macro lens. You can the lens cap and the front element together as a “lens cap” of the macro lens. A rubber band can keep it together.
With the widest aperture the depth of field will be very narrow, so you may want to shoot with the smallest aperture you can. In bright sunlight this should be no problem. Otherwise you may want to use a tripod and a remote, or the camera’s self-timer, and flash(es) etc. Without the front element the auto-focus will not work, so it’s better to turn it off. Focus by moving the camera or the subject.
Using an extender increases the magnification.
Here are some sample photos I shot using my makeshift macro lens:

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About the author: Juha Loukola is a photography enthusiast based in Finland. You can visit his Flickr page here.

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The posts and articles provided by our news desk our not always our own personal views.Tweet at #AceSocialNews #AceNewsServices and email us at News & Views 

Thank you, Ian [Editor]

A Remote Shutter Release for iOS Devices That Masquerades as a Roll of Film

A Remote Shutter Release for iOS Devices That Masquerades as a Roll of Film:

Ever since the launch of iOS 5 in mid-2011, iPhones, iPads, and iPods have accepted the “volume up” signal as a “take a picture” command, allowing Apple’s headphones to double as handy remote shutter releases. If triggering your camera’s shutter with a pair of earbuds in your hand isn’t “hip” enough for you, check out this new iCA Remote Shutter by Japanese novelty photo company Gizmon. It’s a dedicated shutter release for your iOS device that’s designed to look like a roll of film.



It comes with three pieces: the film cartridge shutter release, a retractable cord (an ordinary 3.5mm aux cable), and a holder for storing your cartridge on your keychain when it’s not being used:

Simply plug one end of the cable into your device, the other end into the film roll, and you’re set for shake-free picture taking (and for covert picture taking when you don’t want to reveal that you’re taking a picture).
The shutter releases themselves come in three flavors: red, yellow, and green:

The iCA Remote Shutter doesn’t come cheap: they cost $23 a pop over on Amazon.
Gizmon iCA Remote Shutter A (via Technabob)

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The posts and articles provided by our news desk our not always our own personal views.Tweet at #AceSocialNews #AceNewsServices and email us at News & Views

Thank you, Ian [Editor]

How Wearable “Sousveillance” Cameras Will Transform Our Society

How Wearable “Sousveillance” Cameras Will Transform Our Society:

Have you heard of the term sousveillance? It’s the inverse of surveillance: instead of a camera pointed at individuals, individuals wear their own cameras on themselves to document their activities. Wearable-camera pioneer Steve Mann has written a fascinating piece for Time, titled “Eye Am a Camera: Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Glassage“, in which he offers his vision of what the future will look like once wearable cameras such as Google Glass (seen above) become ubiquitous.



Mann argues that it will soon be absurd to enforce any “no photography” policy, even in private places, as “cameras become integrated into the very fabric and flesh of our society and the prosthetic territory of individuals”:

Consider the automobile or wheelchair as a middle ground between building-mounted (surveillance) cameras and wearable (sousveillance) cameras. Would a drive-in theater owner kick out a driver who had a rearview camera or dash camera? Would you throw someone in a wheelchair out of a movie theatre because a rear-view or auto-pilot camera was part of the wheelchair? We’re starting to see this trend in concert halls where organizers are giving up their fight against audience members using camera phones. But once cameras become part of the human mind and body, their fight will be completely lost.
[...] society will return to a world in which there is both sousveillance and surveillance (both “undersight” and oversight) rather than today’s world of [...] surveillance without sousveillance (oversight without undersight).

Here’s something crazy for you to think about: photography is often prevented these days because authorities can see the cameras being used, but what happens if/when the human eye can be used as a camera or if/when memories can be projected onto a screen? At that point, anything people can see and any location people can visit will be fair game for photographs, and society will simply have to adapt and live with it.
Eye Am a Camera: Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Glassage [Time]

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Thanks for sending in the tip, Phil!

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Image credit: Photograph of Google Glass camera by Chris Chabot

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The posts and articles provided by our news desk our not always our own personal views.Tweet at #AceSocialNews or #AceNewsServices and email us at News and Views at
Thank you, Ian [Editor]

Rent a Light Truck for Just $1,500 Per Day

Rent a Light Truck for Just $1,500 Per Day:

Want to illuminate an entire football field for a photo shoot, but can’t find enough friends who will let you borrow their external flashes? Have deep pockets? Here’s a “lighting accessory” you might want to add to your camera bag: the light truck.



Earlier this week, David Hobby of Strobist shared the results of experiments he conducted in lighting high school football games using way-off-camera flashes. He writes,

In the end, a lot of extra work for a chancy, potentially frustrating result [...] the final conclusion has to be that lighting night football is not practical [...] Even with near-optimal gear, no deadlines and a friendly home-field coach, the results were disappointing to say the least.

Hobby also asked his readers if they knew of any ways to light the field more reliably. A reader named Daniel responded with a comment saying,

Every problem has a solution. But some solutions are expensive. :) Rent a light truck.

What you see above is the “Sky High Lighting Rig” “light truck” by a SoCal-based company called DADCO. It features massive articulating lights, an onboard power generator, and dimmer controls. You can rent one to illuminate your outdoor photo shoot for just $1,500 per day.
Here’s another of the company’s light trucks called the “G-4 Nite Sun“, which features four 24kW lights that produce roughly 20 million lumens:

As an added bonus, it comes with “extension ears” that let you attach gels to the lights.
If you ever have the opportunity to use the light truck in any kind of photo shoot — perhaps you need to photograph a jumbo jet — be sure to share your experience and results with us!

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Thanks for sending in the tip, Phil!

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Image credits: Photographs by DADCO

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The posts and articles provided by our news desk are not always representative of our personal views of the story.Tweet at #AceSocialNews or email to News & Views Thank you, Ian [Editor]

The U.S. election, live on YouTube

The U.S. election, live on YouTube: Today we’re introducing the YouTube Elections Hub, a one-stop channel for key political moments from now through the upcoming U.S. election day on November 6. You can watch all of the live speeches from the floor of the upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions, see Google+ Hangouts with power brokers behind the scenes, and watch a live stream of the official Presidential and Vice Presidential debates. You won’t need to go anywhere else for the must-watch moments of this election cycle...they’re all happening on the Hub live.



In addition to videos from politicians and parties, a diverse range of news organizations—both established names in media and sought-after new voices—are sharing their coverage of the political process on the new hub. You’ll find live and on-demand reporting and analysis from ABC News, Al Jazeera English, BuzzFeed, Larry King, The New York Times, Phil DeFranco, Univision and the Wall Street Journal. Each will put their own stamp on the Presidential race—from the conventions to the debates to election night.







Of course, we’ll have special live coverage around the Republican National Convention from August 27 to 30, the Democratic National Convention from September 4-6, the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates in October, and election night. Bookmark the Elections Hub now for a front row seat along the road to the White House.



Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager



(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

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Google Maps heads north...way north

Google Maps heads north...way north: Search for [cambridge bay] on Google Maps and you’ll fly to a tiny hamlet located deep in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada’s Arctic, surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice. High above the Arctic circle, it’s a place reachable only by plane or boat. Zoom in on the map, and this isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (“musk ox”) Street and Tigiganiak (“fox”) Road.





View Larger Map

Cambridge Bay in Google Maps

There are 4,000 years’ worth of stories waiting to be told on this map. Today, we’re setting out on an ambitious mission to tell some of those stories and to build the most comprehensive map of the region to date. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View team has traveled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut. Using the tools of 21st century cartography, we’re empowering a community and putting Cambridge Bay on the proverbial map of tomorrow.

The hamlet of Cambridge Bay

We’re not doing it alone, but with the help of the community and residents like Chris Kalluk. We first met Chris, who works for the nonprofit Nunavut Tunngavik, last September at our Google Earth Outreach workshop in Vancouver, where he learned how to edit Google Maps data using Google Map Maker. Today Chris played host to a community Map Up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from the nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chromebooks and used Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's North. But they didn’t stop there. Using both English and Inuktitut, one of Nunavut’s official languages, they added the hospital, daycare, a nine-hole golf course, a territorial park and, finally, the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture.

Catherine Moats, a member of the Google Map Maker Team, working with Chris Kalluk and others at the Community Map Up.

Now we’re pedaling the Street View trike around the gravel roads of the hamlet and using a tripod—the same used to capture business interiors—to collect imagery of these amazing places. We’ll train Chris and others in the community to use some of this equipment so they can travel to other communities in Nunavut and continue to build the most comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s Arctic. As Chris put it to us, “This is a place with a vast amount of local knowledge and a rich history. By putting these tools in the hands of our people, we will tell Nunavut’s story to the world.”

The Street View Trike collecting imagery of Cambridge Bay.

So stay tuned, world. We look forward to sharing with you the spectacular beauty and rich culture of Canada’s Arctic—one of the most isolated places on the planet that will soon be, thanks to the people of Cambridge Bay, just a click away.



Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google Earth Outreach team



(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog and new Google Canada Blog)

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Disruptive science service Mendeley passes 100m API calls

Disruptive science service Mendeley passes 100m API calls:
A couple of weeks ago we reported some fresh moves by Mendeley, the London-based science startup, to use some of its big data to provide an exciting new analytics product for researchers. Now the service says it’s ramping another aspect of its business — a science data API that is already hitting landmark numbers.
Co-founder and CEO Victor Henning told me that the company’s API, which offers other services access to its trove of millions of scientific documents, has just surpassed 100 million calls each month. A year after launching the service — which provides access to the information stored in around 65 million scientific papers, documents and files in Mendeley’s databases — the site has around 240 apps that employ it, and is now seeing growth rocket. And that growth, he said, comes through the increasing popularity of those apps, not through any new, specific effort on its own part.
Henning highlighted a few of the projects which are creating the bulk of that traffic, including some interesting examples of the benefit opening up some data can have on what is, traditionally, quite a closed market.
For example, Readermeter.org and Total Impact are both services that measure how much impact a particular scientific paper or author has by analyzing how much and how widely the work is read. Meanwhile productivity app Hojoki integrates with Mendeley, pulling updates in alongside other services to create a personalized newsfeed for you.
Perhaps most interesting of all is OpenSNP, a project that allows people to share their genomic data with each other. It’s using Mendeley to help users cross reference the data they are finding out about their own genetic makeup with the latest scientific research as a way of understanding what’s going on in their bodies. If that’s not mind-blowing, I don’t know what is.
Henning says this is all part of a move to opening up science.
Next up? Wary of Twitter’s recent API troubles, Henning says that Mendeley wants to enable as many third party apps as possible, and has no plans to force money out of them — instead focusing on paid accounts and secondary services like its institutional dashboard.
“In academia, everything revolves around journals — but everything is behind a paywall, only available to universities who pay expensive subscriptions, and without APIs or other ways to access the data,” he said. “People see the importance of this [Mendeley's API] for opening up science.”
“We want to keep growing the ecosystem, get apps talking to each other and get more integration with the Mendeley experience” he adds. “But we don’t intend to monetize the apps.”


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