Snapping a photograph while driving isn’t the smartest, safest, or easiest thing to do. How then should one go about snapping pictures of the interesting things you drive past without breaking the law or putting people at risk?
Caleb Kraft of Hack a Day has one possible solution: remote-controlled cameras that attach to the side windows of a car.
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When the grip on his Canon Rebel T2i finally peeled and warped beyond repair, NYU computer science and mechanical engineering student Rob Huebner decided to go the DIY route. He found a beat up leather shoe, cut the proper shape out of it, and attached the leather graft onto his DSLR using rubber cement.
Image credit: Photograph by Rob Huebner and used with permission
Artist-hackers Becky Stern and Limor Fried took an old Brother KH-930e knitting machine from the 1980s and turned it into a device that can “print” photos onto garments. Andrew Salomone showed off the machine at World Maker Faire New York 2011, along with a ski mask that has his face printed on it.
(via Craft)
Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
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Hacker Rob Flickenger wasn’t satisfied with ordinary photographs of his ongoing Tesla coil experiments, so he decided to shoot Matrix-style “bullet time” images to capture “3D lightning”. He purchased 10 Canon A470 cameras and configured them to function as a single 70-megapixel 10-angle camera.
Why that particular camera? Partly because I found someone dumping a bunch of them on eBay for cheap, but also because they run CHDK, the infamous scriptable firmware for Canon cameras. This let me write some code to streamline the process of taking ten photos all at once, and then get them off of the cameras in a reasonable manner. By wiring all of them to the same 10-port USB hub, and using CHDK’s syncable USB remote feature, I was able to wire up a single button to make all of the cameras fire at once.
His hard work paid off, and Flickenger managed to capture some pretty unique shots of his Tesla coil in action.
Bullet time lightning [HackerFriendly.com]
Photographer Adrian Onsen wanted to use the AI Servo autofocus mode on his Canon 40D in low-light situations, but found that the AF assist beam is only emitted once until focus is achieved rather than every time the camera needs to refocus. He then purchased a laser pointer from a dollar store, disassembled it to obtain a defocused beam of light, and attached it to the top of his camera. The hacked-together AF assist tool ended up working pretty well — Onsen was able to shoot sharper photos at a dance club without anyone noticing the extra light. To learn more check out his in-depth writeup here.
AF Assist tool (via Hack a Day)
In December 2010, Russian security firm ElcomSoft announced that they had cracked the encryption software that Canon uses to prove that photographs are genuine and unmodified. Today they announced that they’ve also cracked Nikon’s system, which shows that forged images can be made to pass validation using Nikon Image Authentication Software. To prove their point (like they did in the previous case), they released a series of ridiculous images that pass validation. The above image shows Russian president Dmitry Medvedev addicted to Apple(s).
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4K video recording may soon be available to Canon T2i/550D users willing to load a firmware hack onto their cameras. Apparently a guy known as Earz62801 on YouTube will be releasing a firmware hack on 1/1/11 that will give the T2i/550D 4K, 3K, and 2K recording capabilities and bit rates between 45MB/s and 175MB/s. He claims that 91 seconds of footage can be recorded at 2K and 175MB/s, though the time drops down to 6 seconds for 4K.
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For Christmas, Kyle‘s girlfriend Sarah wanted to give him something photography related, so she gutted a broken Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash camera and turned it into a one-of-a-kind clock!
Image credit: Kodak Brownie Clock #2 by dream_noir and used with permission
Last week Alexandre Oudin’s creative Facebook portrait idea spread like wildfire on the Interwebs, and was even featured by CNN. If you’d like to do the same thing with a portrait or photograph of yours but don’t have the time or technical know-how to do so, there’s a new website called Pic Scatter that does all the work for you. All you need to do is upload and resize and reposition the image to your liking, and the website will allow you to download all the individual photos for the “hacked” profile pic. The only downside is that a “Made with picScatter.com” bar is added to your image.
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