When I was in the hardware store one time, I noticed that they sell those little peep hole viewers that get inserted into doors. They were only around $4 so I picked one up hoping that I could make it into a wide angle conversion lens for my digital camera.
In the meantime, I read several articles about people that managed to glue a peep hole viewer onto the front of their webcams and digital cameras. I didn't want this to be permanent, since I expected the optics in the $4 viewer to be crapola anyways. I just wanted to make a neat accessory incase I ever wanted to re-shoot the cover of "Are You Experienced?" or "Ragged Glory".
The point and shoot Canon digital camera that I have has an attachment for this "adapter tube" thing, which allows 52mm threaded filters (or wide/tele converters) to be attached. My friend John gave me an old 52mm UV filter to use for this project. I tried removing the glass in the filter, but had to resort to just busting it and removing the little pieces. Then I cut a piece of wood to fit into this threaded ring that had a hole in the middle wide enough for the peep hole viewer to be inserted through.
The peep hole viewer has about 1.5CM of extra threaded tube behind it.. I cut that off to get the actual viewer's lens as close to the cameras lens as possible. I also cut off a very small part of the second piece of the viewer, which is the outer-tube that threads onto the viewer itself to hold it within the door. Then I cut a length of copper tubing to put around the viewer to hold it all in place against the piece of wood. Hard to explain, but you can see it in the pictures below.
The lens itself works exactly as intended, although the quality is quite crappy since the $4 viewer is made out of plastic I believe. When I shoot with this lens, I use the cameras zoom to zoom into the picture so the edges of the "fish-eye" touch the edges of the frame. I also usually manually focus the image, although auto focus does usually work.
Not a bad little project for the price, and for the wierd unique effect. Check out some pictures..
