Interesting effect.....

I was playing around this evening with my camera and had my 70-200 lens on. I just happened to point the camera towards my window blinds and realized that I could somehow see through them with the lens focused far away. Kinda blew my mind Both of these photos were taken from the relatively same position at the same exposure, the only thing changed was the distance of focus. I guess the 70-200 lenses come with x-ray vision as a feature I'm curious to know the "why" behind this. Keep in mind, the slats in the blinds are not "see through" at all. I guess this would be a good trick to know if you were a private investigator

think of it this way hold your finger in front of you face then look at something behind it you can see if perfectly. I think thats whats going on here but very cool!!

Fricks wrote in post #12821571
think of it this way hold your finger in front of you face then look at something behind it you can see if perfectly. I think thats whats going on here but very cool!!

Yeah, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't see a thing through those blinds with my own eyes.

jra wrote in post #12821610
Yeah, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't see a thing through those blinds with my own eyes.

Well the lens has a much bigger diameter than your eye.

Fricks wrote in post #12821571
think of it this way hold your finger in front of you face then look at something behind it you can see if perfectly. I think thats whats going on here but very cool!!

Doesn't that only work because most people have two eyes? I mean, if you close one eye and then try to do the same thing with your single opened eye, it doesn't work so well.

It sort of works like the human brain. Have you ever taken a shot of a scene, only to get home to view it & see that it doesn't really look as it did "in real life"? Just as the eye / brain view (where we only see what we want to see), here,the blinds are out of focus, but the scene behind it is the area of focus. There is enough detail filtering through the stringholes & gaps in the blinds for the lens to focus on. Cool effect though.

This is used to shoot through fences and such all the time, actually. Just set a wide aperture, press the lens up against whatever is blocking the view, and hopefully it won't be noticeable. Longer focal lengths and wider apertures help.

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #12830116
This is used to shoot through fences and such all the time, actually. Just set a wide aperture, press the lens up against whatever is blocking the view, and hopefully it won't be noticeable. Longer focal lengths and wider apertures help.

Yea, I do this to shoot through fences quite frequently...but the fences are usually quite easy to see through. I was amazed at how much detail/light was actually making it through the small openings in the blinds that was completely non-visible to the human eye.

Mine does the same thing, only with girls dresses. Proof pics to come tomorrow.

There's enough gap in the blinds for the lens to see through. Just think of those gaps like the pinhole in a pinhole camera, it's the same sort of principle.

Sorarse wrote in post #12834022
There's enough gap in the blinds for the lens to see through. Just think of those gaps like the pinhole in a pinhole camera, it's the same sort of principle.

That's sort of what I was thinking. Only thing is, one time I had make a pinhole camera for a class, and one of the people in the class put three pinholes in his camera just to see what would happen. And he got some really weird looking stuff. I guess because the holes weren't all the same size, so they were focusing at different spots and interfering with each other (or, like, something like that).

im trying to think back to my high school physics class, but i think thats (partially?) due to slit refraction.... the blinds formed a slit. since you are not "zooming" with your eyes, all you see is the slight division between the blinds. the zoomed in lens picked up the diffraction pattern