To work around the mind boggling exclusion of manual aperture control while shooting video on the 5D MarkII, various people have discovered that Nikon glass functions beautifully with an F to EOS mount adapter. I concur, it delivers what this camera should have delivered out of the box. I have to admit, while I am very impressed with the 5Dm2 for what it is, it falls short in many areas. Some of them are unforgivable (noise in RAW mode) for a camera at this price point. It's making me think I should be looking at Nikon or Sony for my next camera. I hope someone from Canon Marketing, in a position to do something, reads this and sees the writing on the wall. I am considering jumping ship and converting all my glass as soon as a competitor comes out with an HD shooting SLR with manual aperture control. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 is looking promising. So does the Red Scarlet. I have a lot of Canon glass, and selling it would suck, but it won't cost me that much to convert. Are you listening Canon? (UPDATE: They listened. New firmware is out.)

I wanted to build a lens for an 8x10 camera with a large aperture so that I could do some contact printing in palladium or silver (kallitype or silver gelatin paper). Of course, I needed a camera to go with it. The lens construction is a simple, two lens element design made using the method described by Alan Greene in his Primative Photography book. The camera consists scrounged bits from work (gator board, plastic, spring steel) plus plenty of duct tape from home. Total out of pocket cost: $15 for three film holders (ebay) plus about $15 in lens parts. The ground glass was from another project so I did not need to make one.