Gel Lens

A typical standard prime lens will be perhaps six elements in five groups. A classic Tessar design will be four elements in three groups. A triplet is three elements in three groups. Even a triplet can produce some excellent results, as I've found out recently with my older-than-myself Rolleicord II.

This idea is for a lens that comes in popular contemporary dSLR mounts, and offers what is essentially only a triplet prime of perhaps standard focal length only (eg, about 33mm?). The difference is that this simple lens has no glass - each element of the triplet is made of an optically transmissive gel sealed within a more substantial pair of convex discs to form the meniscus lens, and can be deformed. The entire triplet unit gets deformed as a unit, by design of the barrel. The barrel will have been designed to house the focus helicoid, but in this case, is made all floppy too, so that squeezing the barrel in such a way as to laterally distort it, carries much of that tortion to the gel elements in the triplet unit, distorting that, too (but not too much, and not severely).

The result might be that the lens when distorted laterally will act as a feeble but crude shift lens, with no accuracy whatsoever, and in being distorted will also introduce normally intolerable amounts of primary and secondary chromatic abberation and spherical abberation, as well as nonlinear displacement of the image.

If you let the distortion of the triplet unit be too great, you'll just end up pushing the image circle off the area of the sensor - it's got to be a fairly subtle action, and so the result will be quite subtle too. It won't be the camera equivalent of a hall of mirrors effect. It'll simply be the equivalent of the worst lens design errors you can have imagined, but dynamically manipulable or mutable.

(ps: can we do a Camera: Lens category? Ta.)