I love awkward little in-between moments in technology. One of the funniest was a two-year period (about 2006-2008) when all filmmakers used these things called “35mm adapters” mounted on camcorders. Here’s a picture of one setup that I used to use.

35mm Adapter 1

That little metal monstrosity in the middle with the M on it has a 9 volt battery spinning a piece of ground glass inside. You can attach old Nikon lenses to it. The back of it is a macro adapter that screws on to the camcorder.

35mm Adapter 2

This let us actually get larger image circles into our tiny-sensor camcorders literally by making a tiny movie theatre inside a black metal box and filming it with the camcorder. The results were beautiful though.

Every filmmaker was screaming for a large sensor digital cinema camera, and then the 5D Mark II came but it didn’t shoot 24 frames per second 🤦‍♂️.

So we kept using these goofy adapters until Canon stopped being idiots and this brief awkward moment in history was over.

Still, there’s something I like about the 35mm adapter over the 5D. Something analog about that ground glass (but losing 3 stops of light was a bit much 🙂).