#51: Photos taken by Mobile phone!
Posted: October 28, 2009
Filed under: Interesting, Macrography
Tagged: Macrography
Comments: 4 Comments
Description
Here is my evil story about modifying my cell phone to take macro photos using a small lens scavenged from a DVD player!
Our malevolent tale of immorality serving my vice for taking photos begins with an article on Vietnam’s biggest news site: http://vnexpress.net/GL/Vi-tinh/Kinh-nghiem/2009/08/3BA12F60/
The article shows how to take macro photos with a cell phone, using a tiny lens adapted from a BROKEN DVD player. Seemed pretty easy and effective to me.
They did not have detailed instructions; it was translated from an English article and some lines were cut or mistranslated. Yet I still could understand pretty well and wanted to give it a try—to serve my photo addiction. To bring you beauty. Sometimes beauty requires a bit of unpleasantness.
The article said to find an old broken DVD player, open it up and look for the tiny lens used to read the disk. By removing that lens and attaching it over the lens of a phone, extreme macro photos become possible. Man, doesn’t that sound breathtaking?
I was curious. Intrigued. Inspired. My photo addiction twitched and called me silently to do this—no matter the cost, no matter the consequences, no matter who gets hurt. I wanted to do this as I’ve never wanted anything before. I could already see the photos of tiny, tiny things blown up huge in full digital technicolor, causing admiration and gasps of pleasure from you, my faithful viewers. This tiny lens would SURELY make me, HA KIN, the greatest photographer in the world!
My family has one DVD player that works perfectly well. I have no broken DVD player.
But shit happens. Doesn’t it? Evil shit.
I peeked into our living room, secretly watching my father enjoying a music program on DVD.
He looked happy.
My longing for that tiny, perfect lens tugged at my artistic soul. Evil thoughts formed silently and began to harden my heart. “Look at him! Look how he loved the music, the movies…all spewing from that old and unfashionable, but perfectly working DVD player! Damn Japan and their quality electronics! Why oh why couldn’t my family buy cheap Chinese things like all the other Vietnamese people?”
“Too bad, Daddy”, I thought. “I WANT THAT DVD PLAYER – AND I WANT IT DEAD!
I had discreetly taken note of where my father kept his tools under the chest.
My treacherous plan formed itself. I would wait until he falls deeply asleep and kick off my wicked plan.
And so it goes that one breezy happy evening, my father was happily dreaming, taking his nap when…out came the tools. A few turns of the screwdriver later, the case on the perfectly good DVD player had somehow popped open, and then things began to “fall out”…
As I have said earlier, what the article described sounded so easy and effective. But since the instructions were not quite clear, I had hard time finding the lens they were talking about. The article described a tiny lens attached to the reading arm of the DVD, but I saw several similar ones around!
I took them all, to make sure I would get the right one.
Dad was snoring, still deeply asleep. I hope he was enjoying his dreams, because it would be a while before he saw a nice movie again…
That tiny lens the article talked about did not work. I tried to put it on the cell phone and everything was blurred, and the hard cover that was described as something to help stick the lens to the cell phone vignetted the blurry images with a circle. Drats! Foiled!
I was disappointed. If this had been a real BROKEN DVD player, I would not have felt that bad. But I had sacrificed my father’s entertainment for my own–entertainment.
I felt bad! Regret. Shame on me! The only path to redemption would be success and the photos that would come from that success! I labored on…
Determined to make this work, I tried out the different lenses that I had taken from the DVD player earlier, in the hope of making my sin pay off, so that all of my treachery and betrayal would not be for naught. Finally, the last lens I tried, although it looked so dirty and unclear, seemed to be working! It felt like I had been saved from drowning! Because that hard cover attachment refused to work, and this tiny lens is smaller than the lens from the cell phone, I had to put the tiny lens directly in contact with the surface of the cell phone’s lens. I had to be extremely careful: that tiny bit of glass can fall out at any time if I tilt the phone just a bit too much. And since my prize little lens is so tiny, once it is dropped, there would be no way to find it again!
Let us remember, the cost of the tiny lens is not cheap: it cost the price of a whole DVD player, the happiness of my father, and the consequences that I would surely face…eventually, maybe, if I couldn’t somehow figure out how to blame this on my brother, or perhaps the cat…
I looked for little things around my room to shoot then I decided to go outside to take some outdoor photos. I went down to the grass in the yard. There, I found growing different kinds of tiny flowers. I wanted to take real close up shots of these beautiful things.
This is the funny part. In order to take clear photos, since it is macro, I had to move the cell phone real close to the objects, and I had to see by eye when the correct distances were attained to bring the details into sharp focus. I also had to be careful when I moved the phone, because I certainly did not want that tiny lens to drop off into the grass, never to be seen again by my feeble human eyes!
I dropped it.
I dropped it seven times.
And each time it dropped, I thought I would never, ever find it again. I had to slowly pull out each blade of grass by the root, intensely watching for some little sparkle. I could not lose this thing. Thoughts of my father’s sadness haunted me and spurred me on to keep looking, keep looking, keep looking…
And I did not look so pretty as I was taking photos of the grass or trying to look for the lens. There I was, alone in the yard, on my knees, butt pointed skyward, hands picking out blades of grass by the root. No one who was passing through would ever understand what this cute little girl was doing. Pessimistic people might think I was mentally ill and had just escaped from the asylum. Optimistic people or those who watched so many CSI episodes would think I was a CIA agent looking for some hidden microphones on the ground. Only another Ha Kin or my brother would know the truth!
Finally, I finished my photo session and decided to go back home. As I pushed open the door, I realized my father would have woken up by then–and he would probably be thinking of some punishments for me
As I walked into the room I saw him looking at the corpse and detached body parts of the dissected DVD player. He was mumbling over and over that familiar “Father Song”: “Oh no, not again…”
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