Ditch the DSLR? The 200-year-old science of my new favorite camera (2^14 sub special!)

Hope you enjoy the video! This one's coming in a bit late for the 2^14 milestone because I just finished my PhD and moved across the country (a task that's still in progress) so bear with me - the channel may be relatively empty for a bit longer while I get settled… I swear there are multiple pre-filmed vids in the pipeline that just need editing! Video corrections: None yet! Find my mistakes! =D

There's a hidden advantage to this setup: Because it takes a picture in ultraviolet, which has a lower wavelength than visible light, it has a higher theoretical maximum resolution for a given lens size. Clearly ultraviolet cameras the the future for smartphone manufacturers on the hunt for more megapixels without increasing the size of their optics.

The cyanotype process is self-inhibiting - the forming dye blocks off UV from hitting the light sensitive iron 3 oxalate. I ran into this issue myself. You will achieve a massive sensitivity increase by just coating the paper with the photosensitive iron 3 salt of choice (I use a mix of Fe3Cl and oxalic acid) and developing the latent-ish (visible as a discoloration of the yellow sensitiser) image in a ferricyanide (or ferrocyanide for a positive image) bath. I got an overexposed image with an f4.5 tessar (4 element, the less glass in the lens the better the uv transmissivity) with just 4h of june sun exposure.

The fact that you're still only at 18k subs is insane. You stated that you don't want to make a patreon because of your random schedule, but honstly, I'd still support it. You could just make it a support per video. I support several channels that only release 1 or 2 videos a year

Amazing, I would turn your both photos into negatives to see the photo as it should be seen, it will give you a positive image of your house but with yellow colors

A person might have guessed that the cyan from cyanotype came from the word cyanide, but it just comes from the greek color word cyanos, for dark blue, which is where the word cyanide also gets its name.

Spherical abberation is actually an well known issue (with an stupitidly simple solution) that commonly got solved by astrophotographers in the 70's and 80's: Just curve the film. Back in those days astrophotographers used so called "Schmidt-Cameras" to capture images of Deep-Sky-Objects, such as galaxies and star clusters. These cameras where build sort of like an Newtonian without an secondary mirror but an place to attach films and where widespread. Schmidt-cameras suffer from the same issue due to its curved focal plane. To curve and cut the films into round shapes they stamped them out using special stampers, that could deform and cut simultaniously. The real question for your camera is, whether you have to curve in or out and at whitch radius. An other option would be an Field-Flattener lens. BUT they get used for corrections on the scale of an fullframe sensor, not at the scale of an whole paper. So a bit too pricy and complex, considering you would have to custom-make that lens. Fun fact: Today curved sensors are relevant and there are rumors Sony works on curved sensors for a better image-quality without expensive optics. The Kepler space telescope is actually an modern Schmid-Camera with an array of curved sensors. Hope this will help or at least inspire you.

"...and also a wee bit of a tendency to light itself on fire." I just HATE IT when my camera does that...😊

Those prints are so satisfying, the blue is such a lovely color! To get more light I think you only have one option: rebuild Herschel's 7ft newtonian telescope as a camera 😇 Can't get a better light bucket than a big newtonian! :)

You have to build a R E A L L Y B I G and bright camera flash.

So, since these were essentially negatives, and I have sometimes in the past found it difficult to 'evaluate' or 'analyze' what's in a photo from its negative, I wanted to see what inverted images would look like. Thought somebody else might find this interesting, so here's a link to imgur gallery with the photos processed (simply inverted, or inverted and desaturated to mimic black and white photography): https://imgur.com/a/v2c4SXv . I have to say, I really like the photo from the front of the house, especially with the blue/yellow color scheme.

Two ideas: reduce spherical aberration by adding a "mold" behind the paper that brings it into focus everywhere (or at least along the longer side to avoid crinkles). Also you could try to use vacuum (maybe a battery powered aquarium pump?) to press the paper down. Great content as always, keep it up!

The head lab tech at my old schools photography department would take multi month exposures with long since expired photo print paper. She'd abandon pinhole cameras hidden around the city. It was pretty cool seeing the sun tracks shift as the months past on a single photo.

I can actually say something because this is my wheelhouse, and I research this for a living as a photograph conservator! I would have a couple of suggestions on this. 1) In regards to aberrations, a simple way to get rid of them is to make a symmetric doublet, and for the focal length you are at, the easiest way to do it would be to get two +1 diopter reading glass blanks, which would add up to 500mm together, and then you could add a lens to bring it up to the 350 mm range using the lens makers formula. If you get your positive meniscii from surplus shed, you can get it pretty cheap, and just use PVC pipe to mount. Also will let you pick your aperture, because some of those meniscii get massive. 2) sensitivity: a good rule of thumb with these things is that water helps with speed. You are on the right track with Ware’s formula ( as a crystallography thing, his cyanomicon is a great read because of how Prussian blue works, and is free online). Arpan Mukherjee’s work using different iron salts is also good, and can be found on alternative photography .com. A final hint would be to sensitize, and dry your paper, but then humidify it using a wet blotter behind it. Wet paper gains around a spot of speed. 3) if you really want to make a project, explore science, and cry, try Lippmann plates. Gabriel Lippmann got a Nobel prize for his work, and a paper which came out just a month ago showed that the Lippmann plate is actually a multispectral resolving surface, so you can actually use the images as a tough imaging spectrometer (good luck, it will never happen because it is so finicky, but in theory, it does work)

Just learning how blueprints are made blew my mind, the way you made it into a camera is insane! This is very cool!!

I have found that most things science that is fun is directly proportional to its potential to bursting into flames. so this camera is thereby a more fun camera to use scientifically speaking.

When I was a young lad working in a hospital, I had access to xray film stock, which is around 8 x 10 inches. So, I built am 8 x 10 camera with a magnifying-glass lens... When I exposed the xray film and developed it, it came out quiet well... It's perfect for contact printing...

8:35: Never thought I would see transistor man ever again, but here we are!

Dollar Tree Poster Board is the material of pioneers! :D

If you didn’t know, there are special transparencies made for printing onto with an inkjet. There are some with a dry gel like layer that absorbs ink well (but washes off with water), and there are also waterproof ones that I think are just made to be particularly porous. Less smudging than using a normal transparency. To get a particularly opaque printing, it’s often necessary to print extra ink (CMY and black all at once), which of course means smudge mitigation is even more important. Big Clive’s videos introduced these transparencies to me for the purpose of making circuit boards with dry film photoresist, which is a rather similar process to your masking of cyanotype paper. Of course, a laser printer doesn’t have those issues at all.