construction

Natalia Barberis

How We Made a Mobile Darkroom for a Homemade 16×20″ Camera

In December 2015, Shane Arsenault and I had started talking about a joint photography project with the purpose of using his 16”x20” Bellows Camera on a larger scale, which would give us the freedom to work outside a conventional studio space.

Shane Balkowitsch

I Built the Largest Natural Light Wet Plate Studio in the US in Over a Century

There are fewer than 1,000 wet plate collodion artists practicing around the world, and as far as I know, I am the only one in the state of North Dakota. 5 years ago, I didn't own a camera and knew nothing about photography. I saw a wet plate online and I was immediately drawn to it, and thus my journey began.

Gannon Burgett

Take Your Photography to New (Literal) Heights with a 12-Foot Tripod

There are times when all you need to capture the perfect photograph is just a few more feet in height. A common technique is to carry around and use a ladder to stand on and snap the needed photograph. But a ladder is far from convenient in terms of weight in size.

Thankfully, there’s an alternative that’s far smaller and not overly cost-prohibitive. It’s often called a construction tripod, laser tripod or contractors tripod and it’s a much smaller, more convenient way to get your camera high up in the sky.

DL Cade

Construction Time-Lapse Shows the Step-by-Step Removal of a Dam

The 38-foot-high Gold Ray Dam had spanned Oregon's Rogue River for 106 years by the time Jackson County decided enough was enough. A defunct hydroelectric facility that hadn't been operational since the early 70s, it was one of the last fish barriers still up along the Rogue River. In other words: it had to go.

In the spirit of documenting the experience, the folks at HDRinc decided to employ time-lapse photography to capture the process of methodically tearing down the dam from start to finish.

Michael Zhang

Photographs of Wooden Beams Matching the Lines of Buildings

Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (yes, the ones who created a large format camera out of books) have a clever series of photos that uses wooden beams to play around with a few things photographers often think about: lines, angles, and perspective.

For each of the photos, the duo constructed a structure of wooden beams that blends in with buildings in the background from the perspective of the camera. The resulting scene looks as though the wood magically connects the lines of the buildings with the foreground.

Michael Zhang

BTS: Constructing and Using a Pegboard Backdrop for Starry Portraits

We've featured photographer Nick Fancher's pegboard backdrop experiments a couple of times now (see here and here), and each time the setup gets fleshed out a bit more. Yesterday, Fancher released the above time-lapse video that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he constructed his "white room" inside his tiny basement (the ceiling is just 7-feet-hight).

Michael Zhang

Time-Lapse Video Spanning 3 Years and 45,000 Photographs

You've probably seen time-lapse videos spanning hours, days, weeks, or months, but how about years? Ramon, a videographer based in Paris, spent three years shooting the same location in Paris, documenting the teardown of an old skyscraper and the construction of a new one. The photographs were shot between January 2007 and September 2010 using a Pentax K110D DSLR, and a whopping 45,000 photographs were captured.