Just how much lens do you need?

At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging.

One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images.  The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines.

My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape.  Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source.

I recalled that I had some loose lenses stored somewhere, so I found them and had a look to see what they would do.

I took off my macro lens, simply held a small magnifying glass lens in front of the camera body and photographed a colour changing LED fibre-optic lamp.  The result is a green “ghost”!

I then got my much larger loose magnifying glass lens and shot a single light.  There are so many optical imperfections and distortions, but I was pleased with the shape it produced.

I’ve recently dismantled an old digital projector and removed the lenses.  I’ve got loads more ideas I want to try with those, so thanks Tej!