Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style “bullet time” footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.

NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan.
Read more…

CyanogenMod is sort of like Magic Lantern for Android phones. It’s an open source, replacement firmware option for people who want to get more out of certain Android devices. And the most recent update targets the photographic community — in a hands-free sort of way. Read more…

Older Sigma lenses that were designed for Canon EOS film cameras often don’t work correctly when mounted onto a new EOS digital SLR, even though the newer bodies still use Canon’s EF mount. If you’re an owner of such a lens, you might have heard that you can send it in to Sigma’s service center for them to rechip it in order to make it compatible again.

Did you know that those of you who are handy with electronics can actually do the rechipping yourself at home? Photographer Martin Melchior recently did this with his Sigma 70-210 f/2.8 APO lens, and says that anyone with basic soldering skills can do the same.
Read more…

Nikon’s D5100, D3100 and D7000 all come with their own video time limits that keep them well below the 30 minute mark necessary to keep from being classified as “video cameras.” That’s because, as we’ve mentioned in the past, video cameras are charged a 5.6 percent duty that the manufacturers would like to avoid.

The D5100, for example, will stop you from recording once you’ve hit 20 minutes or 4GB, whichever comes first. In all honesty, most videographers won’t see a need to record videos any longer than this, but if you do, the Nikon Hackers have released a hack that removes this time limit from the D5100, D3100 and D7000. Read more…

If you’re the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there’s something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.

At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams.
Read more…

Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!
Read more…

Here’s a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn’t give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.
Read more…

Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects’ eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects’ eyeballs!
Read more…

David Hobby over at Strobist shares a fantastic idea for photographers who would like to always have some gaffers tape handy at all times:

So we are gonna make a gaffer’s tape keychain fob [...] That right there is 40″ of gaff, effortlessly carried by default, at all times [...]

No, no, no. While duct tape may in fact be more manly, gaff is what duct tape wishes it could be. And it is what photographers use because of its holding power and ease of clean removal. Don’t ever mistake the two.

All you’ll need is a paperclip, a wooden pencil, and a larger roll of gaffer’s tape. Head on over to Strobist to read Hobby’s step-by-step tutorial.

Genius: Make a Gaffer’s Tape Key Fob [Strobist]

Image credits: Photographs by David Hobby/Strobist

After shooting music events, Perth-based photographer Perry DeGennaro keeps the media passes and wrist bands as mementos. Recently, however, he started realizing that he wanted a better way to store and display them. He had an old mannequin arm lying around, which he decided to put to good use by mounting it to his wall. The arm makes for an eye-catching display — every time he returns from an event, he simply hangs the lanyard from the should or wraps the wristband around the wrist.

Image credit: Photograph by Perry DeGennaro and used with permission