Sending a camera up to the edges of space on a weather balloon has been done quite a bit now, but perhaps none of the projects have been as creative as Ron Fugelseth’s effort. Ron worked with his 4-year-old son to give his son’s favorite toy train Stanley a fun and exciting ride to space. They built a rig consisting of a weather balloon, a styrofoam box, an HD video camera, and an old cell phone for GPS. Stanley was then attached to the outside of the box using a rod, positioned so that the camera would be perpetually pointed at Stanley with the world in the background. Read more…
California-based designer Joy Kelley of How Joyful upgraded her camera recently and needed a new bag to carry it around in. Instead of buying or making a single camera bag, she decided to make a flexible padded insert that can be moved around from bag to bag. After creating a very nice looking insert and testing it out for a few months, she writes,
I have to say that I completely love my camera carrier, and changing purses is super easy! My carrier fits in all my purses, in some more tight than others, so when I need to carry more than just my camera I simply choose a bigger handbag, works beautifully!
What’s awesome is that her solution features moveable dividers just like the camera inserts you can go out and buy, which let you adjust the insert based on the gear you’d like to carry. If you want to try your hand at making your own, Kelley has written up a detailed step-by-step tutorial. The ingredients you’ll need are: some felt or fleece, canvas or fabric to protect the outside of the carrier, foam for the padding, a long piece of velcro, and standard sewing gear.
If you need a tabletop photo studio for nice-looking product shots, a quick build involves using a piece of poster board and some household lights. If you have a bit more time, money, and carpentry skills, you can do what Nick Britsky did and construct a dedicated mini photo studio. He started the project by creating a mockup of the studio using Google’s Trimble’s free and easy to use SketchUp 3D modeling program. Once he knew what pieces he needed, he had all the wooden parts cut out at his local hackerspace i3 Detroit. He then combined the pieces according to his model, painted the wood white, added a couple of lights from his local hardware store, and covered the sides with white ripstop nylon.
You can find more pictures of the studio here. If you’d like to build one for yourself, you can grab the Google SketchUp file that Britsky used from his website.
If you want a way to display and rotate through your latest prints and instant photos, you can try making yourself a photo ledge. It’s a simple photo holder created using a long piece of plastic u channel molding, available at your local hardware store. Find a way to attach it to a wall — perhaps using velcro, tape, pins, or adhesive — and you’ll have yourself a convenient little ledge that you can use to show off your images. The photos simply rest inside the gap in the plastic ledge, so you can quickly swap prints in and out when you grow tired of certain images. Head on over to Photojojo for the step-by-step tutorial.
Earlier this week, we shared a funky piece of camera equipment called the Bounce-Wall, which features a large card that serves as a surface to bounce your flash off when you’re out and about. While the pricing wasn’t available at the time, David Hobby of Strobist has since revealed that it’ll carry a $99 when it’s released later this month.
If you don’t have any free benjamins to drop on this product — or don’t want to wait — the fine folks over at Lighting-Academy have created a ghetto do-it-yourself version you can build and use. All you’ll need is an old wire clothes hanger, a piece of cardboard, some aluminum foil, a clothespin, and a tripod screw. The tutorial is in German, so you might need to use an online translater or base your build off the pictures alone.
The bean bag is a tool that photographers sometimes use to stabilize their camera. Plop it down on a fixed platform, and the bag can do wonders for achieving sharper shots. Instead of buying a bean bag for a marked up price, you can easily create a do-it-yourself version at home. After all, it’s just some beans in a bag… Digital Camera World has a step-by-step tutorial on how you can create one using some lentils and a pair of unwanted jeans.
What’s great about using a pair of jeans, beside the fact that denim is a very durable material, is that you can cut out the crotch section — a bit strange, we know — in order to give your bean bag a built-in zipper. This makes filling the bag a breeze, and allows you to quickly change the number of beans inside to make the bag softer or firmer.
Modder Andy Rawson needed an easy way to find air leaks in his 100-year-old house in order to improve its energy efficiency. Not wanting to spend thousands of dollars on a thermal imaging camera, he decided to go the DIY route. He built a box containing a 64-zone temperature sensor, and managed to connect the device to his iPhone via the dock. By overlaying the temperature data onto the iPhone’s camera display, the $150 attachment instantly turns the iPhone into a cheap thermal imaging camera. Read more…
Bandoliers are pocketed belts made for holding ammunition. They’re often seen in action and war movies, slung over the chests of tough guys holding big guns. If you’d like to ensure that you never run out of photographic ammo (AKA film) when you’re out and about, you can make yourself a nifty DIY film ammo strap. Photojojo says that these are inspired by old school camera straps that come with elastic film loops, but we definitely think you should go the extra mile and turn them into full-blown bandoliers.
What you’ll need is some fabric and elastic, a key ring to serve as a connector, and some sewing tools and skills. While it’s designed to be attached to your belt or to the strap mount on your camera, adding some extra length to it can turn it into a belt/bandolier. Head on over to Photojojo for the low-down on how to put this thing together!
Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light — way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market. Read more…
Samuel Cox, the “maker of things” whose Minority Report-style photo viewer we shared last year, was recently invited to a friend’s wedding. He came up with the neat idea of creating a TARDIS-themed photo booth for the wedding reception, an accessible way for guests to leave photo memories in a lighthearted manner. Read more…
