Released in 1971, the Polaroid Big Shot was a funky, green plastic camera that was built for one thing: portraits. The plastic behemoth is simply designed, using a fixed focus 200mm, single-element plastic meniscus lens.
Australian photographer and avid DIY-er Jim Metcalfe recently decided to up his macro photography game by building his own stereoscopic macro camera to capture and create 3D images.
A photographer built a DIY medium format camera from an Epson flatbed scanner and shot a 514-megapixel picture with it.
A team of photographers built a super fast f/0.3 29mm lens from a Leitz projector lens to shoot a beautiful short film.
Photographer and computer science undergrad student Joshua Bird has created a 3D-printed movie camera that uses "normal" photo film canisters, with the goal of letting him enjoy the nostalgic look of film video without paying for expensive motion picture film.
A 3D-printable adapter allows fans of the Game Boy Camera to use small CS-mount interchangeable lenses with it, which also opens the door to adapting much larger optics to the camera first made available in 1998.
A team of designers has created what it calls the Photon: a small, simple, light meter that is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico and costs a fraction of what most camera accessory companies charge for one.
A photographer came up with a novel way of protecting his lens when using a remote camera to capture rocket launches.
For those with family members who grew up in the 1980s (or earlier), a slide projector was a pretty common way to share and show images before the internet was a thing. But these days, finding a way to get people to sit and view these images in a dark room with you is even harder than finding a functional projector. To covert his old 35mm slides to digital, photographer Scott Lawrence built a custom digitizing system based on a slide projector.
This trinocular "wigglegram" lens creates vintage film-looking stereographs and is made with a combination of 3D-printed parts and scavenged disposable camera lenses.
The KineCAM is an instant camera-inspired "DIY" device that allows users to capture and create "animated" photographs (of physical GIFs) in the form of a kinegram.
As creatives are tasked with greater and greater volumes of work, accessories to help speed up their workflow become more and more valuable. While editing consoles can be incredibly useful, they can also be incredibly expensive, which is why YouTuber "Pedro" of DSLR DIY CNC has shared how you can build your own custom "InfiniteDeck" for just about $50.
Have you ever had a repeated inconvenience that finally makes you say to yourself, "Okay, I’m done with this garbage"? Well, that’s the exact feeling I had with using contrast filters on my enlarger. Anytime I wanted to use a contrast filter, I needed to use tape to hold it in place while I was printing.
Benedek Lampert, a Hungary-based photographer who specializes in photographing toys and miniatures (especially Lego), has shared a behind-the-scenes look at one of his largest projects yet: the 801-piece Harry Potter Hogwarts Express train set.
Apple's foray into digital cameras was short-lived but one photographer is still using his, only with a Nikon F-Mount placed on the 1995 camera.
Photographer Felix Steele has created a design for a 3D-printed 164mm f/2.5 lens that has no fasteners or screws, uses affordable glass elements, and can be built at home for less than $15.
Photographer and lens enthusiast Mathieu Stern has attached a disposable camera lens to a Sony Alpha A7 II to recreate the 1990s look.
A filmmaker has built a home-made motorized camera rig out of the recycled parts from an aging 3D printer.
Steve Giralt's The Garage Learning film school raised over $410,000 on Kickstarter in 2020. But now, just under two years later, the business has filed for bankruptcy as the idea "did not work as planned."
A British man has built his own lens with a super fast 35mm f/0.4 equivalent bokeh that is constructed around an old episcope projector lens and a mechanical system for controlling focus.
A photographer has used his 3D printer to create an impressive 900mm reflector telescope that is so simple to put together that "it’s like assembling furniture from IKEA."
I’ve used poly-boards, bounce-boards, and even white sheets and white walls as lighting modifiers to soften the light in the past, but arguably the quickest and most efficient way to instantly achieve beautifully soft light, is the V-Flat.
DIY-er Sean Billups has transformed his old Google Pixel 3A into a multispectral camera that can view in Ultraviolet (UV) and Infrared (IR) wavelengths that are not normally visible to the human eye.
I do a fair bit of macro photography in the studio, for both scientific and artistic purposes. I’ve used tripods, boom poles, and large copy stands to get the camera in close. The setups were often complicated, and I sometimes felt I was concentrating more on the gear than the photograph.
An industrious photographer 3D-printed replacement parts for his broken Olympus E-M1 after the camera froze in negative four-degrees Fahrenheit conditions while snowboarding.
Photographer Corrine Gretton-West booked a wet plate workshop with me before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Two years later we were finally able to do it.
Scrap metal artist and ASE-certified technician Christopher Bissett has built a camera out of scrap metal that features a "working" flash and shutter button.
ArduCam has developed a new 64-megapixel, high-resolution camera that works with the Raspberry Pi, giving DIY camera builders a lot more creative flexibility.
Are you sometimes annoyed by having too many easy and convenient ways to take perfect photos? Don’t despair…
There is no denying that shooting on film is expensive. It is among the many reasons major studios have all shifted to using digital cameras for their movie-making. But even with the shift in technology and cost, there is just something appealing about the way these old analog cameras work. This is why engineer and designer Yuta Ikeya decided to make his own analog movie camera with 3D printing.
Like many photo and video creatives, the team at Syrp Lab has a lot equipment that takes up an obscene amount of space. In this seven-minute video, the team shows how it turned a dark and cluttered room into something organized, functional, and fashionable.
My name is David Windestal, and in this video and article, I will share how you can hack and modify a Game Boy Camera to mount serious camera lenses in order to shoot amazing lo-fi photos.
I occasionally like to do some light painting with strobes. To make that easier, I ripped off the legs of an old light stand so that it is just a handheld pole with a light. I also wanted to be able to control my camera with a remote when holding the light so that I can operate my camera on a tripod and do everything without an assistant.
Photographer Ronaldo Carvalho took an old and broken fixed-lens Olympus film camera lens and adapted it to work on a new Canon EOS R6, breathing new life into retired gear.
I purchased some of the new compact and foldable Godox softboxes (e.g. AD-S60S, AD-S65W, AD-S85S, etc) for my Godox AD300 Pros. They work just fine but I wanted to use the magnetic color gels from my AK-R1 kit with them, so I decided to design my own gel holder compatible with the AD300 Pro.
A cheap adapter from Sintech allows industrious photographers to take inexpensive SSDs and build their own CFexpress memory cards at home, allowing them to possibly save hundreds of dollars over "official" cards.
Battery technology has provided a plethora of ways to take power away from traditional wall outlets, including relatively small packs that can power photography lights. A man in China took that idea to the extreme by building a colossal 27,000,000mAh "portable" power bank.
Instead of using a filter or editing technique to achieve a lo-fi look, Sean from Fotodiox went a different route and converted a 1984 Ghostbusters toy and adapted it to a mirrorless camera to create an unusual yet authentic vintage look.
Light shaping tools are very expensive. What if you could take any object and turn it into a modifier? That would save you a lot of money as well as give some unique results. In this article, I will share some everyday objects that you can turn into light modifiers to get different looks.
I do mainly large format photography, and I often take my own self-portrait by using my pneumatic cable release that has a long cable and air bulb release. However, I have long been thinking about how to make a more modern kind of remote cable release. In this article, I will show how I created a DIY remote cable release.