cute

Michael Zhang

Make a Point with This Vintage Camera Pencil Sharpener

This cute little vintage twin-lens reflex camera by Chinese stationary company deli is actually a pencil sharpener in disguise. Instead of loading it with film, simply stick a pencil into the top "lens" and turn the handle on the back to sharpen it. It has an adjustable sharpness knob, and the top half pulls out when you need to dump the pencil shavings.

Michael Zhang

How to Instantly Double Your Film Stash

Lomography shop manager Liana Garcia Joyce recently discovered an awesome trick for increasing your film stash: all you have to do is get married to someone who loves analog photography just as much as you do!

Michael Zhang

Delicious Canon Rebel XT Cookies

Check out these Canon Rebel XT cookies made by CookieJan's Creations. They're 3D, with 67mm "zoom" lenses attached, and are tasty for both the mouth and the eyes.

Michael Zhang

Polaroid Camera Models Made with Paper

Mel Stringer (aka girliepains on Etsy) keeps dreaming up cooler and cooler camera papercraft decorations. Her latest creation is a Polaroid model that include fake Polaroids to stick in the slot.

Michael Zhang

Check Colors the Tasty Way with Pantone Chip Cookies

Freelance designer Kim Neill had the awesome idea of creating Pantone Chip cookies, and stuffed some Pantone tins full of them as gifts for her clients. Needless to say, they were a hit, and she soon began receiving requests for refills.

Michael Zhang

Pint-Sized Toy DSLR Complete with Swappable Lenses

Ordinary DSLR cameras too big and bulky for you? Check out the CHOBi CAM ONE, a DSLR-style toy camera the size of an eraser that actually has lenses you can swap in and out. It shoots 1600×1200 still photos and VGA video at 30 frames per second.

Michael Zhang

Instax Mini Print Playing Card Deck

Sarah Ann created this beautiful full deck of 52 playing cards using Instax Mini instant film prints. Each card is a unique, and is a photograph of the card it represents.

Michael Zhang

Mini Fondant Camera Cake Decorations

Jenny from I Love Muffins created these awesome mini fondant lomo cameras for decorating cakes with. If you enjoy making cakes, this could be a fun project when making them for photography-enthusiast friends.

Michael Zhang

Post-Processing a Cute Kitten Portrait

My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn't much light to work with, and I didn't bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven't done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here's a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you'll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc...

Michael Zhang

Cross-Stitched Polaroid Dark Slide Cards

Check out these super-special Polaroid-themed greeting cards by Heather Champ. They're made using two dark slides from expired Polaroid 600 film:

The five colour bars (celebrating the new PX 70 packaging) create a negative space heart surrounded by the idea of a instant film frame.

Once the front dark slide is cross-stitched, the front and back are dry mounted with rubber cement to folded white card stock. The inside is blank. The card is accompanied by a matching blank white envelope.

Try making these yourself as a do-it-yourself project. If arts and crafts isn't your thing, you can buy them for a special Polaroid-lover in your life for $25 from Heather's Etsy store.

Michael Zhang

Uber Cute Collection of Photo Booth Marriage Proposals

The cute photo above of a surprise photo booth proposal is making its arounds around the Internets right now. Angela writes on her blog,

These are the pictures from when we got engaged. I have no idea in frames one and two and am really confused in frame three (lets never make that face again!) and really surprised in frame four.

Turns out the idea of popping the question unexpectedly in a photo booth in order to capture the resulting (priceless) expression is quite popular.

Michael Zhang

Double Up Polaroids for a Simple and Sweet Memory Card Game

Here's a terrific "Doh! Why didn't I think of that?" idea shared by Flickr user Ralph Odenwälder in his photostream: create a set of matching Polaroid photographs for an awesome do-it-yourself memory card game that you can either give someone as a present or play yourself!