put things in focus
I love my cameras. I love my Pentax ME. I love my Leica M2. These camera companies have been around for decades, and certainly before I was born. I wonder, where do these camera company names came from? It turns out the established names in the industry, the names on the cameras we learned to [ ] The post What s in a Name? Where Camera Companies Got Their Names appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
I love lenses. I love the ray diagrams I can build with the specs, I love the history, and I love all the possibilities that lenses can do for the betterment of the world. I also love the lens names themselves, because the names engraved on the front rings of the lenses we use every [ ] The post What s in a Lens Name? The Famous Lens Names appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
What s in a name? More to the point, what s in a name for optical terms? Specifically, the words we use every day as lens designers. Have you ever stopped to wonder where they came from? It would be a shame to ignore the reasons behind the words and terms we use every day, because the [ ] The post What s in a Name? The Optical Words We Use Every Day appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
I like eras. These are named chunks of time. I live in Japan, and we use the Common Era (CE) notation alongside the Japanese calendar — 令和 (Reiwa) 2019–present, 平成 (Heisei) 1989–2019, 昭和 (Showa) 1926–1989, 大正 (Taisho)1912–1926, and 明治 (Meiji) 1868–1912 for modern Japan. Each had its distinct flavor — we still sometimes refer to [ ] The post The Eras of Optics: A Tour Through the People Who Built…
I wanted to take a moment to share some personal reflections about Dr. John E. Greivenkamp, whose passing we mourned in 2022, but whose impact on optics education continues to resonate in ways both profound and deeply personal. It has been a few years after his passing, and I felt compelled to write this now. [ ] The post Remembering John Greivenkamp appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
I participated in an overseas conference and gave a presentation. This was the first time I went overseas since the pandemic. The whole experience was a mix of excitement, concern, restlessness, and happiness. Let me explain. This was my first overseas trip of any kind since the pandemic As it was for everybody, 2020 and [ ] The post Aachen Polymer Optics Days 2022 conference report. This time I…
There are very few academic institutes that specialize in optics. The Center for Optical Research and Education in Utsunomiya University is one such institute. There are universities that have an engineering department. Many universities have a mathematics department. Other colleges specialize in music. I’m from the Physics department myself. 1. Introduction I live in Japan, [ ] The post Academic…
What is the logic inside lens design? There has to be a process, an approach, a method to which this all works, right? I took a deep look into my own lens design process and methods to craft what I think is a guideline of sorts when doing the nitty gritty of lens design. The [ ] The post How to apply logic to your optical lens design process. appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
Although I like to nerd out on lens design a lot on this website, it s not only the math and techniques of lens design that interests me. I ve found that to learn lens design, there are many more aspects than just being able to learn the software, or just being able to calculate the ray [ ] The post 12 steps to learn lens design (so you become awesome at work). appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .
I went to Hiroshima, Japan, to attend an optics conference. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot. I have to say that there was a lot of presentations on Freeform surfaces and Freeform optics, so that may be something that we can investigate further. Want to hear about one of the more [ ] The post I attended the ODF 18 Lens Design Conference :) appeared first on A Pencil of Rays .