Need to do a quick tracking shot on a table but don't have any dedicated camera equipment for doing so? A book and some fine powder can be a cheap and easy way to get the shot in a pinch.
Photographer Michael Zelbel of Good Light Magazine published this short video tutorial on how you can use a simple white shopping bag as a cheap way to add soft off-camera lighting to your portraits.
Magic Lantern is announcing that it has passed a new milestone in hacking DSLRs: making Linux run on Canon DSLR cameras.
The news was announced in the group's forums yesterday, and many people believed it to be an April Fools' joke, but it turns out the development was actually real (the joke was making it look like a joke).
A few years ago, we wrote about how phones can be used as negative film strip viewers by simply inverting the screens. Swedish photographer Adam af Ekenstam took the idea a step further by using an iPad and iPhone together as a simple yet powerful negative viewing station.
An Indian security researcher has been awarded $12,500 by Facebook after discovering a ridiculously simple hack that could have wiped out vast numbers of photos on Facebook.
Want to remove the glow in your model's ears when photographing them in front of a bright background? Instead of dealing with the problem in Photoshop, you can fix it during the shoot itself with just a bit of gaffer tape.
Want a simple battery-powered time-lapse camera that you can leave in locations for up to a year? A hacker who goes by "val3tra" is trying to build one. The goal of his project is a camera that can continuously photograph a scene for months or years on time while powered only by a handful of ordinary batteries.
The "Special Moments" camera is a cheap plastic 35mm camera that you can pick up at certain dollar stores for just a buck.
Photography enthusiast Daniel Goodale-Porter wanted to make his even more "special," so he set out to see how much he could improve the design and functionality of the camera, DIY-style.
Have you ever bought a GoPro just to realize that your life might not be quite as extreme as you initially thought? We've seen it before, and that’s exactly what happened recently with Instructables user Brooklyntonia.
But rather than watching her GoPro Hero 3 collect dust on a shelf, she decided to create an unlikely pair by Frankensteining together her unused GoPro and an old AGFA Ansco Shur Shot she had lying around.
When it comes to carrying light stands, it’s usually best to use a dedicated case so they don’t get damaged and carrying them is less of a hassle. But there are times when a case isn’t a viable option. This usually leaves you struggling to carry them all at once or making multiple trips to the car just to get your light stands.
Thankfully, Dave Bode from Tuts Plus has come up with a cheap and clever gear-hack that makes carrying several mismatched light stands a lot less awkward.
If you use Dropbox to store and share your photos, the recent news of an alleged username and password hack probably has you worried. But according to Dropbox, it shouldn't. Not only was Dropbox not hacked, but any usernames/passwords that might have been compromised were reset months ago due to suspicious activity.
Got $30, a frisbee and some free time this week? Need a ring light? If you answered yes to both of those questions, we've got a neat, quick and super simple DIY tutorial that's perfect for you.
Want to shoot digital photos with a Leica rangefinder without having to buy an expensive digital Leica M? You can do so by creating a digital back for a film Leica M.
That's what Eugene Zaikonnikov did over the course of a year, creating a digital back for his Leica M4 with the sensor from a Canon 350D DSLR.
GorillaPods are an incredible little photography accessory to have in your arsenal. You can pick up a model for cameras as small as a GoPro and as large as a DSLR with a 70–200mm lens attached. Heck, some even come with unique features such as magnets in the feet that allow you to more easily position them onto magnetic surfaces.
As cool as the magnetic ones are though, Instructables user tinstructable realized that Joby’s magnetic options are limited to only the smallest offerings in the GorillaPod lineup. And so, naturally, he came up with a DIY method to turn the larger model into a stronger, more capable magnetic version of his own.
If you enjoy strange and experimental photography, Nathaniel Stern's work should delight you.
For the past ten years, Stern has been creating experimental image-capturing devices using a conglomeration of hacked-together desktop scanners, battery packs and other various computer components. Once created, he straps these machines to his body and takes them from location to location capturing images unlike any other camera out there.
When capturing a photograph, something many of us meticulously try to account for is the lighting -- more specifically, how much light is coming from what sources.
Using ratios, a bit of rough math and a pen & paper, you could write it down. But sometimes numbers don’t directly translate into results. Here with an ingenious way to properly capture the lighting in a scene is Felix Kunze and Sue Bryce.
The Rokinon 8mm f/2.8 lens is one of the best options for photographers wanting to get in on the super-wide-angle action with as little of an investment as possible.
One problem with this lens, however -- and it's the same with most fisheye lenses -- is the curved front element. With such a dramatic curve, the use of filters on such a lens is almost impossible... almost.
No matter how many hours you spend in Photoshop each day, it’s inevitable there’s a feature or utility within the app you’re yet to use or are completely unaware of. Such was the case for this neat little tip by Digitalchemy that we just stumbled upon, which shows you how to import a collection of photographs into Photoshop, each as a new layer in the same file.
As 3D printing becomes more easily accessible and cheaper to work with, more and more people are experimenting to see just how the technology can be used to improve and tweak their photography. One such tweak has been created and shared by Instructables user Jan_Henrik.
By putting together an unused filter casing and a 3D printed piece of plastic, he's able to get some extra ‘pop’ in his photos and videos in the form of cinematic JJ Abrams-like lens flares.
Just the other day we shared an awesome ‘hack’ of sorts to get up to nine times as much battery life out of your camera using an external battery. And today we have another hack, albeit one that’s a bit more involved and uses extra batteries you might actually have laying around the house.
When it comes to days where there are long periods of shooting -- particularly video -- it’s always nice to know you have enough battery power to make it through the day. And while Canon’s LP-E6 and LP-E8s are great, they tend to only last about an hour a piece when shooting HD video.
To make sure you have enough battery life to shoot a fair amount and then some, Chris Winter shares a neat little semi-hack he’s come up with to make an external battery capable of lasting up to 9 times as long as a standard Canon battery.
We recently took a look at some of the best camera hacks that will save you tons of money. Today we’ve decided to turn things up a notch and progress to the next level! If you’re the kind of person who loves to take things apart to find out how they work, you’ll love the ingenious camera hacks below.
With 98% of mobile malware being directed towards the Android operating system, it's no surprise that the Google Play Store contains more than a few insidious applications that intend to do you harm.
The most recent of these to make headlines is an app uncovered by AVAST, which hides behind the thin facade of a night vision camera app and does its best to empty out your wallet.
It's a sad day for the Internet... according to Trend Micro's security analysts, it's been discovered that photographs of both sunsets and -- even more heartbreaking -- cats being shared across the web contain malware capable of getting into your bank accounts.
Uh-oh... this isn't good. Just as Snapchat's star seemed like it would continue rising indefinitely, the company has suffered a massive setback in the form of an information leak of massive proportions. Taking advantage of a recently-revealed vulnerability, hackers were able to pull 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers from the service and publish them online for the whole world to see.
GoPro cameras may be ready to migrate from helmets to film schools thanks to the Ribcage, an in-development assembly that allows the tiny action cams to be outfitted with interchangeable lenses.
Canon owners certainly boast the most advanced custom firmware with Magic Lantern, but Nikon Hacker is making some progress. Case in point: with the release of a new hack, Nikon D5100 owners can now use manual controls while shooting in LiveView.
A popular iOS and Android app that promised to generate torrents of Instagram likes and followers for its users also swiped thousands of passwords for the service, and is now being called a massive scam.
The weekend is coming up, and while many of us will spend it watching football, napping and otherwise lazing about, some people seem to make much more productive use of their free time. Take the hacker group Hackerloop, for example.
They recently equipped a miniature version of the house from the Pixar movie "Up" with a camera, hacked Instagram so it could automatically upload shots, and then sent it flying over Paris attached to 90 helium balloons... now that is a weekend well spent.
From the Dept. of "I Wonder What Will Happen If I Shove This Into There" Research comes news of handy substitute for a dedicated remote camera trigger.
DIY camera geeks have a new low-light option with the debut of the Raspberry Pi NoIR, a version of the popular camera module add-on for the single-board-computer that ditches the infrared filter on the image sensor.
A lot of people love the "vintage look" in photography these days.
Of course, it's one thing is to capture it with the plethora of software readily available -- or by applying "vintage filters" (like the ones on Instagram) to a digital image -- and it's another thing entirely to get old technology to work for us today and create photographs just like we would have done 30, 40 or even 100 years ago.
Sick of carrying your tripod separately from your camera backpack? If you have certain types of backpacks, you can add your own strap loop system to the bottom to serve as a makeshift tripod carrying feature.
In October 2012, astrophotographer Raymond Collecutt of Whangarei, New Zealand shared a new (and risky) idea he was playing around with: converting a standard DSLR into a sharper monochrome camera for photographing space.
Here's some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.
Web developer and photographer Nicholas Sherlock came up with a pretty cool customization recently. Inspired by Flickr's image montage layout that does proper justice to landscape and portrait photos alike, he took a stab at writing some code that does the exact same thing to any thumbnail gallery.
It was only a matter of time until spammers got ahold of Instagram, and yesterday it finally happened. Even though the Facebook-owned company hasn't yet made any moves into advertising, you may have noticed an awful lot of pictures of fruit on your feed this weekend.
That's because some spammers managed to hack many an Instagram account Saturday, posting random photos of fruit and singing the praises of a "miracle fruit diet."
Creating a 3D scan of an object can be done several different ways. We've seen everything from long distance laser cameras and hacked Kinects used to great effect. Computer engineer Giancarlo Todone's take on creating a 3D reconstruction takes another approach: using focus stacking.
For some filmmakers, the arrival of the Magic Lantern RAW video recording ability has become a godsend. With increased sharpness and a remarkable improvement in dynamic range, it's quickly become a much talked about topic.
But how does the RAW footage fare when it comes to bumping up ISO in those low-light situations?
With the availability of a whopping 1TB of storage space now available to users on Flickr, it wasn't long before someone out there found other ways to put 1TB of storage space to good use. That is to say, the uploading of files other than images.
That's just what Redditor rlaw68 has done, allowing the user to upload packaged files by essentially tricking the Flickr servers into thinking you're merely uploading an image. The process involves putting two files in one folder, a GIF image (though some users have been able to do this with other image file extensions) and an archive file (such as a .zip or .rar), followed by combining them to create what only appears to be an image file.