5 August, 2026
Projector Lenses – My Drug of Choice
To paraphrase a fellow photographer from a forum – if you want the real crazy bokeh, projection lenses are the drug of choice. The following article – coming from my hobby...
Alin Leanca
My passion for photography probably goes back to my childhood, to my father and the nights we spent in our makeshift apartment darkroom. Around the age of 13, I wrote in my diary that I had learned how to use a Smena film camera. In 1997, I had the privilege of using my first digital camera - a Minolta. I remember, as funny as it sounds now, that it had less than 2 megapixels. I became seriously devoted to photography in 2014, when I bought my first DSLR and plunged headfirst into this fascinating world.
Everything I know, I taught myself, thanks to curiosity, constant practice, the internet, and a handful of photographers who were generous enough to let me learn by watching them at work.
Because photography has always been something deeply personal to me - a refuge, a means of expression, a form of freedom - I instinctively never turned my passion into a source of income. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I have been able to take my explorations quite far. Today I shoot on digital, primarily with vintage lenses, some of them nearly a century old, as well as with vintage cinema projector lenses or other non photographic glass, a number of which I have adapted myself. What interests me most are photographic experiments - some of which can create genuine visual gateways to alternative worlds - along with female and floral portraiture, performance photography (theatre, ballet, or historical reenactments), and capturing memories from travels to extraordinary places.
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