Everything Old Is New Again: Video Through 136 Yr Old Lens

French photographer Mathieu Stern has a fascinated series called "The Weird Lens Challenge" on his youtube channel, and he recently shared what I think is his most fascinating experiment yet. He look a large-format stationary camera from the 1800s, carefully removed the iris lens, mounted it on his Sony A7II camera, and then posted the video results, which you can watch below:


How well did it work for him? Well, as Stern tells it,

"The lens is incredibly sharp for a 136 years old simple metallic lens, from my test it’s even sharper than most of my modern Canon lenses, the results are amazing … but it also gives some strange lens flares and light leaks that are pretty dreamy".

He also took some still images with the lens, which you can take a look at here.