Hacker Rob Flickenger wasn’t satisfied with ordinary photographs of his ongoing Tesla coil experiments, so he decided to shoot Matrix-style “bullet time” images to capture “3D lightning”. He purchased 10 Canon A470 cameras and configured them to function as a single 70-megapixel 10-angle camera.
Why that particular camera? Partly because I found someone dumping a bunch of them on eBay for cheap, but also because they run CHDK, the infamous scriptable firmware for Canon cameras. This let me write some code to streamline the process of taking ten photos all at once, and then get them off of the cameras in a reasonable manner. By wiring all of them to the same 10-port USB hub, and using CHDK’s syncable USB remote feature, I was able to wire up a single button to make all of the cameras fire at once.
His hard work paid off, and Flickenger managed to capture some pretty unique shots of his Tesla coil in action.
Photographer Gary Cruz is one lucky dude — not only did he get his hands on a Fujifilm X100, but he got what might be the world’s first X100 cake as well! It was given to him by his talented wife Beverly.
Photographer Ian Richardson made this paper camera out of the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, with a small glass pot serving as the lens. Read more…
Here’s a neat photo project for you to try: find a friend who loves photography just as much as you do, and share a roll of film. After one person finishes using up a roll, rewind it and send it to the other person. That’s what photographers Lexi and Natalie did with their project Exposed Far Away. Read more…
With HD video cameras getting smaller and smaller, people are constantly attaching them to random things to give us bizarre perspectives that weren’t very easy to capture before, whether it’s the end of a broadsword or the tip of an arrow. In the video above, some friends decided to attach a GoPro camera to the end of a stick and throw it back and forth while running around. At 6 minutes, it runs a bit long, but who knew the simple idea could create such awesome results?
Photographer Matthew Nicholson created this paper Leica M3 that’s a working pinhole camera. It’s loaded with 35mm film, and even the strap is realistic and made with paper! Read more…
How do camera makers describe their cameras? To answer this question, we took the press releases of some popular cameras and made word clouds with them that are based on the number of occurrences of non-common words. The above word cloud is for the Canon 5D Mark I. Read more…
Bryce Bell of cardnetics created this business card design that features a built-in aperture mechanism. Pull the lever down and the aperture opens up. If you run a photography-related business, this could be a neat business card to pass out to your clients. Pre-assembled cards start at $6 each, while you can buy kits that you put together yourself for $2.50. If you want to try printing and laser cutting the card yourself, the design templates are available here.
Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos! Read more…
What you see above is the inside of the world’s largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It’s an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar. Read more…
