November 2010

Michael Zhang

Print and Build Your Own Highly Detailed Paper Canon Cameras

Last year, Canon celebrated its 50th anniversary in manufacturing SLR cameras and released three super detailed paper craft cameras that you can print out and build yourself. These included the Canonflex, the AE-1, and the EOS 5D Mk II. Unless you have a good amount of time you can set aside for arts and crafts, this probably isn't for you -- each camera has dozens of pages of detailed instructions and a ton of tiny pieces that come together to form the final replica camera.

Michael Zhang

Panasonic Unveils the Lumix DMC-GF2

Panasonic has just pulled the wraps off the Lumix DMC-GF2, the company's smallest and lightest Micro Four Thirds camera. The cameras has a built in flash, employs a 3 inch touchscreen on the back, shoots stills at 12.1MP, captures 1920 x 1080 HD video, and has an ISO range of 100 to 6400. It'll start shipping in January 2011, with the price secret until about a month before then.

Lennard Kager

DIY Small Softbox with Color Filters

Today I spent a couple of hours designing and making a simple box to fit directly onto a normal flash unit. I also made a couple of colored filters. After doing all this I thought I could share this with others and hopefully make them happy by doing so.

Michael Zhang

Holographium Lets You Light Paint Words with Your iPad

Back in September we featured a creative technique that used an iPad to "light paint" 3D objects and text. Now there's an app called Holographium that allows anyone to light paint words with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. All you do is provide some text, start taking a long exposure photo, and then drag your iPad (or whatever iDevice) through the photo while the app slowly displays the various slices of the text. The resulting photograph will show the text spelled out in 3D and floating in the air.

Michael Zhang

The Cottingley Fairies: A Famous Photo Hoax from 1917

The British Journal of Photography is reporting today that Geoffrey Crawley -- the world-renowned photographer who debunked the Cottingley Fairies hoax in the 1980's -- has died. The hoax began in 1917 when two cousins named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths (aged 16 and 10, respectively) claimed to have discovered fairies and, after borrowing a camera, produced photos to prove it. The controversial photographs captured the world's attention for decades and even deceived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before finally being debunked by Crawley in a series of articles published in the early '80s. In 1983 the cousins admitted that the photos were faked using cardboard cutouts.

It's interesting seeing how little it took to fool people with photographs in the early days of photography.

Michael Zhang

Working Medium Format Camera Created with Lego Blocks

Fernando Ramírez Martínez (snipfer on Flickr) created this awesomely geeky medium format camera using Lego pieces.

We started sorting bricks out and after a couple of afternoons working on the camera obscura we managed to get some shots out of the thing. It was built using Lego pieces, duct tape, black cardboard and some glue. The camera shoots 6x6 and the "lens" sports a focal length of 150mm with an aperture of 1:300. All measurements approximate.

In the front there is the shutter and the pinhole. In the back, the gear on the left is the film advance. The white gear on the right has a clutched axis that prevents the film spool from moving freely. The "suspension" does not allow the film advance to turn backwards.