Retro glass camera hack captures the best of yesterday and today

If you have a vintage camera lying around collecting dust on a shelf as décor, here’s a symbiotic hack that combines old-fashioned equipment with contemporary technology to capture an Instagram-esque photograph.

Many people simply use Android or iPhone apps to capture filtered images that would otherwise require a vintage camera or Photoshop. But out of curiosity, photographer and film maker Jason Bognacki embraced the best of both worlds.

“I think apps like Instagram are great fun, but to a lens nerd like myself there is something missing to them. There truly is a “ghost in the machine” in vintage optics,” Bognacki says. “It is truly a magical thing to hold something so old in your hand and see it come back to life and produce images again.”

When his curiosity got the best of him, he added a 1919 Piccolette Contessa-Nettel folding camera that was sitting on a shelf onto his Canon D5 and put it to the test.

“I am a self confessed glass-a-holic. I have been collecting and seeking out vintage, obscure, and trash lenses for a while now. I guess I’ve treated it as an optical education of sorts,” Bognacki said.

His blog, “Today’s Tomorrow,” sporting the tagline,  “Creative Lab and Experimental projects,” is appropriately comprised of escapades with his collection of vintage camera treasures and film types. As Bognacki tells us, he intends to continue the exploration of his findings and “cataloging” of his experiments.

Those of you interested in  the details of how he mashed the two devices together will have to wait in a follow-up blog post from Bognacki. But in the meantime he offered Digital Trends readers a snippet of the process:

“M42-EOS mount + M42 Extension Tube + Hot Glue = The 5D View Camera,” he revealed. “No lenses or cameras were injured in the process. The process is reversible.”

The photographs that he captured exhibit a soft glow, while subduing otherwise vibrant colors for an impressive collection of resultant photographs. Bognacki himself is proud enough of the results to at the least temporarily add his lens hack into his gear. “I do plan on adding this lens/hack to my arsenal of gear I take out when capturing images. We’ll have to see if it earns a permanent place in my camera bag.”

You’ll find a few of the photos below, and you can check out the rest on his blog.

Zeiss Ikon 7.5cm f6.3 (wide open):