Are you looking for creative ways to decorate your walls and display numerous photos without making it look like your crazy great-aunt’s hallway? Now you can with this ingenious DIY project!
While I would love to take credit for this idea, it is really my wife’s brainchild. Apparently a desire to decorate the walls, the concept of saving money while using up junk in one’s basement to make the house look pretty, combined with time spent surfing the web will generate exceptionally creative ideas like this. (Yes, there are others who have done similar. However, that was only discovered after the original brainchild was birthed.) So, let’s get started, shall we? Read more…
Who said that hi-end lighting equipment has to be expensive? And who says the only way to shoot with fluorescent light is to use the flicker-free Kino Flo lights that can cost you thousands of dollars?
I began using my fluorescent lighting technique nearly 10 years ago, long before Kino Flo’s and Peter Hurley became popular. I have been asked to describe it so many times that I decided it was time to put together a few tutorials to show how to build it and how to use it. In this article, I am going to deal with “how-to use” the fluorescent studio lights. Read more…
The Dirkon pinhole 35mm camera is made entirely from paper cut from a template by designers Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolář and Richard Vyškovský. The three published the template in a 1979 issue of Czechoslovakian magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists). While original prints of the magazine are rare, the Dirkon gained cult popularity in Chzechoslovakia. Read more…
If you’re in need of some quick image stabilization but don’t want to shell out the $16+ dollars it takes to buy a real one, an old broom handle can do the trick. All you need besides the handle — or a 1-inch wooden dowel, or a big stick — are a hex nut and hanger bolt for the tripod mount and a spiral nail for the base. MAKE has the lowdown on how you put the ingredients together to form “the world’s cheapest monopod”.
As you already know, we’re pretty obsessed with Polaroids, and all the creative photography we can get our hands on. This tutorial will teach you how to make a pop-up Polaroid camera card that “prints” out a miniature Polaroid picture.
The pieces of card stock for this project are about 7-1/2 inches long by 4-1/2 inches wide. To create a mini Polaroid you can print, we recommend using the Shake It Photo iPhone app. Send the image from your phone to your email, drop it into Preview, Photoshop or Word to resize, and you’re good to go. Read more…
Want to add some custom tints to your photos without resorting to digital trickery? dainy over at Lomography has a tutorial on how you can create a simple color filter using some cardboard and colored transparency sheets. Combining thin strips of various colors can lead to pretty artsy effects.
If you’ve got spent, empty film cassettes lying around collecting dust, Photojojo has a crafty idea for the mindful re-user: make them into rolled invitation or stationery holders.
It’s quite simple: cut and decorate 1.375″ x 11″ strip of paper, pop the top off the film cassette (you can use a bottle opener) and tape the inside end of the strip to the film spool. Wind the paper into the cassette and leave a tab for the recipient to unfurl the message. Read more…
Here’s a tutorial by Elizabeth Giorgi of Being Geek Chic on how you can turn your Instagram photos into beautiful canvas-style prints for about a buck a pop. You can find a text version of the tutorial here.
If you want to snap a photograph of the sun (perhaps during an eclipse) without burning your camera sensor, one quick way is to make a dark filter using an unwanted floppy disk (remember those?). You’ll need to carefully harvest the black magnetic film inside the disk and slice out a piece to cover your lens with. Two words of warning: don’t crease the film, lest you make it unusable, and don’t use the filter with your human eyes.
Here’s a cool DIY project, courtesy of creator Derte84 and the folks over at Instructables, for those of you who have a bunch of slides sitting around but no slide projector in sight. Putting the whole thing together will require a little bit of hardware (e.g. you’ll either need the tools to cut the wood yourself or an account with a laser cutting service) but the final product is pretty cool. Read more…
