A content creator has designed and built his very own 3D-printed camera motion control rig, which he says can create footage comparable to that of highly off-the-shelf expensive camera rigs.
Inspired by do-it-yourself camera parts and projects, Ping-Hsun Chen and Ruha Cheng took things a step further and released a retro-style RUHAcam kit built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to the High-Quality Camera Module.
An electronics engineer has created a do-it-yourself hot-swappable battery solution for photographers who want to keep their cameras going through shoots without stopping or losing any footage.
Having a portable V-Flat in your photography kit can provide a unique tool when creating images for your clients. A V-Flat can be used as a background or a tool to bounce or absorb light on your subject.
In this article, I'm going to tell you the story of my latest camera creation: a digital Polaroid camera that combines a receipt printer with a Raspberry Pi. To build it I took an old Polaroid Minute Maker camera, stripped out its guts, and replaced the innards with a digital camera, an E Ink display, a receipt printer, and an SNES controller to operate the camera.
Designer and commercial architecture photographer George Moua has designed and 3D printed a highly unusual photo tool that he calls a stereoscopic "wiggle lens." In short, it allows you to combine multiple frames shot with a single lens into a moving image that appears to have depth.
If you've ever wanted to learn how to shoot product photos like those seen in Apple advertisements, here's a short 4-minute tutorial by photographer Karl Taylor that you can do at home with just a couple of speedlights and homemade modifiers.
Keeping batteries charged for your camera and accessories is the bane of the professional photographer. With the increasing popularity of battery-hungry mirrorless cameras like the Canon EOS R5 and R6, this has become all the more challenging and important, and that’s what drove me to create this simple hack to track which batteries are charged, and which ones need to go into the AC charger when I get home from a shoot.
Star trackers are important for capturing long exposures of star formations by slowly moving to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. Most modern star trackers use motors to do this, but in this 22.5-minute video, photographer Nico Carver shows how he built a hang-crank version for just $30.
Thermal cameras are expensive. They can cost anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to buy and can cost $50 a day to rent. So why not just build one for around $100?
A few years ago I built an ultra-large-format (ULF) camera that is 24 inches by 24 inches. While it was a pretty huge camera, it was a simple build it was just two square standards, one for the front and one from the back that were connected by a big bellow.
These days people love photo booths and once you have set it up it works -- and pays -- for itself. I found various plans and tutorials, but in my opinion, none of them had a good purchase list or a really good manual. So I decided to make my own.
Over the past year, it seems the whole world has been on hold due to the rampages of COVID-19. In the Facebook groups I’m in, many users were seeing shortages in analog photography supplies. Some online stores stopped shipping Rodinal (a caustic liquid) and other products were just nowhere to be found.
In January, photographer Jay P. Morgan shared a video where he took portraits with what at the time he called an IMAX lens on a Canon EOS R. In part two of that series, he takes it one step further and mounts the medium format GFX 100 to it.
Photographer Jens Heidler, who was recently featured for his macro video of snowflakes melting in reverse, has published a 5-minute instructional video on how to create frozen soap bubbles for dazzling macro photos.
Though there are multiple off-the-shelf solutions for over-head camera angles, DIY-er Jay Doscher decided that there was a better way. By combining a VESA mount monitor arm with a few "universal" parts along with some 3D printed pieces, he made his own.
Student and photographer Imran Nuri was driving alone one day when he started to think about photography and its shape. He asked himself "why are photos rectangular?" The answer might be obvious, but it also got him thinking about what it would be like to capture circular photos instead.
I recently found a very practical solution for diffusing a camera flash. The solution is perhaps the most practical thing available during the COVID-19 pandemic: the spare medical mask that I kept on my bag.
There are certain vintage lenses out there that are prone to have glass elements that yellow over time. If you have one of these lenses, you don't have to live with yellow-tinted results: here's a 3-minute video in which photographer Mathieu Stern shares a simple trick for restoring the lens.
In 2016 and again in 2018, PetaPixel featured the work of Dora Goodman, a woman who was adding hand-crafted elements to analog cameras. Fast forward to 2021, and Goodman has gone steps further and finally created cameras of her own design.
In an endeavor that seems to be driven only by curiosity, Photographer Jay P. Morgan modded an old IMAX lens to allow it to work with his Canon EOS R. But just getting the lens to work wasn't enough, as Morgan decided to take the lens way out of its element: street portraiture.
The world of macro photography is full of fascinating subjects, but eyes and irises have got to be among the most mesmerizing ones. As with most captivating subjects, capturing it can be quite a challenge.
Despite what some people think about LIDAR for cars, in the near future it is foreseeable that this technology will take its rightful place in our daily lives. Not just for cars but with almost anything and everything. We have already seen Apple’s new iPad and iPhone utilizing this technology. I wanted to see if I could use a LIDAR, in its most fundamental function, on a film carrier that is printed on a 3D printer.
A pinhole camera is a simple image capture device that doesn't use a lens but instead makes images through a tiny aperture. The simplest ones are just a light-proof box with a hole in it, and in this 7-minute video, you'll learn how to make one as well as how to make your digital camera into one.
If you're a film photographer who likes to go the do-it-yourself rather than store-bought route, here's a fun little tutorial for you. In this 3-minute Darkroom Magic episode by the George Eastman Museum, Historic Process Specialist Nick Brandreth shows how you can make your own photo paper developer at home from scratch.
Industrious designer Benjamin Bezine has created a Raspberry Pi-powered film scanner that combines with a film advancer made from Lego and a mirrorless camera that along with machine learning automatically scans whole rolls of film.
Each year I update experiments in the collection of the High-Speed photography lab at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). One of this year’s additions is an air-powered water bell.
I’ve been making tilt-shift lenses for a while now, and they’re a bunch of fun to make and shoot with. I don’t think I need to sell you on the creative possibilities of this type of photography and videography.
Iranian photographer and camera tinkerer Alireza Rostami wanted to shoot tilt-shift photos but found the specialized lenses too expensive, so instead he decided to make himself a selective focus lens using a cheap CV boot.
A photographer in Japan was forced to sell his favorite camera earlier this year after being impacted by the COVID-19 recession. Instead of letting that put a stop to his art, he decided to build his own 4x5 large format camera... using LEGO blocks.
Why does someone build their own camera? Maybe for technical reasons, usability enhancements, or perhaps personal style and artistic outlook. The raison d'ètre for the experimental camera I made here falls somewhere between all of the above.
Want to shoot indoor "natural light" photos... at night? All you have to do is build yourself an artificial sun. That sounds wild, but it's actually neither too difficult nor too expensive -- this 24-minute tutorial by DIY Perks will teach you exactly how it can be done.
When I started freelancing as a professional photographer, I knew I had to put together a printed portfolio. Unfortunately, I found it very hard to find useful resources on the Internet on how to actually do this. As I had some experience in bookbinding I managed to bind my first book by myself, but after three books I realized that in this stage of my career, I needed to have something a little more flexible.
Pye Jirsa from Lin and Jirsa Photography and SLR Lounge dispels the idea that making a great home studio is expensive. In this 20-minute video, Jirsa explains how you can make a quick studio at home for as little as $20.
When COOPH has something new published, it's very likely going to have some cool ideas that you can execute at home. In this 6.5-minute video, that remains true as they show eight clever lighting tricks you can easily try for yourself.
A must-have tool when shooting a number of photography genres, including the night sky, is a remote release trigger for your camera. Triggers range from very simple cable releases over phone apps that connect to your camera’s Wi-Fi to very specialized intervalometers. I wanted to build something even better...
Steve Giralt is a New York City-based director, visual engineer, and founder of production company The Garage. He shoots those visually-stunning commercials you see on TV, and while most studios keep secret how they are made, Giralt wants to share it all with the world.
Simone Giertz is known for making some unique and interesting devices. Her original fame came from making "useless" robots but in this 14-minute video, she constructs a photo booth that would allow her dog to take her own picture.
Redditor Whomstevest has designed and 3d-printed a fully-functional Canon EF to RF tilt adapter and provided the design so that you can build your own at home. The adapter allows any Canon EF lens to adapt to an RF body and features infinity focus, 7 degrees of tilt, and 180 degrees of rotation.
After making a fairly straightforward thermal modification to his new Canon EOS R5, maker/tinkerer Yifan Gu was able to get the camera to record unlimited 8K without having to resort to various timer resetting "hacks." All he had to do was swap out the thermal pads and add a couple more.