What's the technology behind these shots?

elf · Post by **elf** » Sat Jul 04, 2009 8:35 pm

It's been a year or so since I first saw images by Satoshi Kuribayashi. I lost the links to his site and have just re-discovered them. http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~kuriken/html/japan/j-second.html

I'm curious about the technology behind the images. Anyone know how it's done?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Jul 04, 2009 11:55 pm

I can't see the images. All I get is Japanese text. When I ask Google to translate the site, it goes into an infinite loop.

What's the trick to see what you're asking about?

--Rik

elf · Post by **elf** » Sun Jul 05, 2009 12:02 am

That's odd, it was displaying a couple of images earlier including one with a camera. This Flickr link has a few of his images: http://www.flickr.com/groups/science-is ... 113509357/

[edit] After selecting one of the galleries, clicking on a number in the link "intro/1/2/3/4/5/6" will open an image

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sun Jul 05, 2009 12:30 am

Don't know for sure, but looking at text on the Flickr page...

The 2006 Lennart Nilsson Award prize for scientific photography has been awarded to Satoshi Kuribayashi, a Japanese nature photographer.

Lennart Nilsson was famous for his photography through an endoscope, essentially placing a very short, very small aperture lens right next to his subject.

Satoshi Kuribayashi, 67, has worked as a freelance photographer since the 1960s. Since those beginnings, he has published no less than 40 books and films, all focusing on insect ecology. Kuribayashi's unique methods are based largely on his skills in designing and fabricating optical devices and other photographic equipment required to both examine and capture imagery at the magnification required to accomplish this work. One of his innovations includes a medical instrument to which he has fitted a lens of only three millimetres in diameter.

That part about "medical instrument to which he has fitted a lens of only three millimetres in diameter" sounds very reminiscent of Nilsson's work.

If that's the technology in use, then what it provides is a very up-close perspective through a very small aperture, producing all the usual diffraction-caused tradeoffs in DOF versus resolution.

It's a good technology, especially for video. But I notice that none of his images open to anything larger than web resolution, and I suspect the reason for that is that the resolution wouldn't support it.

--Rik

g4lab · Post by **g4lab** » Sun Jul 05, 2009 5:25 pm

He appears to be using endoscopes which has also been done by a BBC nature photographer in addition to Lennart Nilsson.

Endoscopes are generally very wide angle and usually are built so that things
touching the front window are in focus and everything else out to infinity too.
As Rik correctly observes they are very limited in there resolution. They also have lots of distortion.

elf · Post by **elf** » Sun Jul 05, 2009 5:58 pm

I think the compositions are as interesting as the equipment. I'm trying to imagine how it would be possible with my current setup.

It would be fun to experiment with a boroscope if they weren't so expensive.

kds315* · Post by kds315* » Wed Aug 12, 2009 4:46 am

A very wide angle lens + very short ext. tube works wonders and produces similar effects. Stopped down, you also get the further parts in focus and the resolution is high enough for APS or a full frame sensor. The only downside is that that contraption is too bulky and scares insects away. That is the advantage of a borescope/endoscope, insects don't recognize them as being dangerous to them.

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Wed Aug 12, 2009 6:07 am

I have an ex-army endoscope (somewhere

)
The tube diameter is about 19mm, it's about 450mm long and the angle of view is about 60º. it came with 90º prisms, so I assume it's meant for looking at the enemy without getting your head blown off.

The eyecup is fixed, about 30mm across. The eye hole, or is it exit pupil, is small though, probably 4-5mm.
What's the best way to get an image from it?

It's already paid for itself, looking for leaks from pipes above ceilings!
It was UK£30 secondhand on ebay.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Wed Aug 12, 2009 10:52 am

ChrisR wrote:The eyecup is fixed, about 30mm across. The eye hole, or is it exit pupil, is small though, probably 4-5mm.
What's the best way to get an image from it?

If the eyepiece is fixed in place, then you need camera optics that are pretty close to the dimensions of a human eye. Webcam or cell phone should work, compact P&S might be OK depending on the lens.

By the way, did you mean "periscope"? I thought that endoscopes were always designed for looking inside things. Not that there's necessarily any difference in the optics.

--Rik

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Wed Aug 12, 2009 4:20 pm

Depends what you're using it for I suppose

If you used it to look into a building through a shell hole to see if Johnny foreigner was within, then Endo it is?

E.G.

kds315* · Post by kds315* » Sat Oct 24, 2009 8:30 am

Forgot, pics say more than 1000 words...

Here are much more recent results:
http://www.pbase.com/kds315/relay_lens_systems&page=all

g4lab · Post by **g4lab** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 11:30 am

They do use them for the purposes of finding Homer Simpson and other criminals but the more likely use for it was looking inside of turbines, truck engines and other heavy equipment that they might rather not take apart.
They are widely used by aircraft mechanics.

You can find , including on ebay, eyepiece adapters which clamp the eyepiece and have a relay lens then a C mount. They also come with or without beam splitting prisms that may allow looking through them AND having a C mount camera. These come up on ebay fairly regularly because there are zillions of them in hospital ORs.

The company names to searce are Karl Storz, Richard Wolf, Dyonics, Weck,
Circon, MP Video, Stryker and probably many others

This one appears to have a T mount and a focusable relay lens. Very nice looking piece and reasonably priced

The one linked above is designed to "bite" onto an eyepiece like this one which has a beam splitter but one to allow a CO2 laser to be used for palliative surgery in lung cancer. The bronchoscope shown doesn't have its own eyepiece. The user screws on either an eyepiece or a beamsplitter of straight camera mount depending on his preference and budget. But the profile of that eyepiece is what most of them look like and the eyepiece adapters are somewhat interchangeable from one manufacturer to another. Not 100% though.

augusthouse · Post by **augusthouse** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 5:45 pm

At the top of each 'gallery' page on the Kuriken website there is a small image of the equipment used (I assume) for the images in the respective galleries.

The equipment used for Gallery 1 and Gallery 5 are of particular interest and also that on the 'What's New' page.

Here is an image from a equipment post I made back in 2007 and a brief discussion regarding the 'glass'.

http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... 7535#17535

Craig

PaulFurman · Post by **PaulFurman** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:56 pm

Another technique is tilt lenses, this is only closeup, not macro but illustrates the idea:

You can see mid-ground out of focus because of the tilt and because I didn't stop down much. That's using a medium format 28mm fisheye lens with a bag bellows on a DSLR.

Here's a hand held tilted macro with a 16mm FX fisheye on a DX camera:

Again, that's wide open at f/2.8, if you don't care about diffraction it's capable of much more. I now use a 24mm PC-E Nikkor which focuses to 1:2.2 but unfortunately it has electronic aperture so with extension it only works wide open.

One other method of faking it is to place the subject, say a small insect in front of another lens that's mounted in the air and position the insect where the lens would focus on the film, now use a macro lens at around 1:1 to shoot them together. There's a guy who markets his custom relay lens to Hollywood movie makers who also used this technique in a demo film and got in a bit of a legal stick over the cheat. Sorry I don't recall the names or the exact outcome, it may have been just obliquely implied that it was his same magic relay lens. It can be a legitimate way of showing little things in the context of their environment.

elf · Post by **elf** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:41 pm

kds315* wrote:Forgot, pics say more than 1000 words...

Here are much more recent results:
http://www.pbase.com/kds315/relay_lens_systems&page=all

Thanks for sharing these. I like the two frog sequences as well as the red butterfly sequence.