I needed a monitor hood for quite some time but wasn't willing to pay the retail prices charged for them, so I decided to build one myself. In this tutorial I'll show you how to build your own DIY monitor hood for less than $12.
We've seen a lot of creative setups for faking that 'bullet time' look—one guy strapped his GoPro to a ceiling fan—but this creation filmmaker Luca Amhofer is the most versatile and functional DIY rig of its kind we've ever seen... and it's dirt cheap to make!
Plenty of photographers these days try their hands at making their own cameras, but Swedish photographer, inventor, and camera maker Mats Wernersson recently did something a little more unusual: he made his own 90mm f/2.8 lens from scratch.
My name is Richard Evans, and I recently built myself a 4x5 camera. Here's a look at the camera and what I did.
Photographer Tyson Haslam recently built himself a giant do-it-yourself camera for shooting large format photos on X-Ray film.
Forget those dinky HD "cameras" attached to tiny quadcopter "drones," if you want to capture really amazing aerial shots, you have to do what Polish photographer Miron Bogacki did: build your own heavy-duty octocopter and slap a high-end full-frame DSLR on that bad boy.
Low quality photos and videos are often referred to these days as being "potato quality," or so bad that they look like they were taken using a potato. But for photographer Colin Lowe, "potato quality" is a spot-on description for some of his photos because they were literally taken with a potato.
Affordable, high-quality high speed cameras a tough to come by. But that might soon change, thanks to Kickstarter and years of work by one diligent engineer.
Photographer Dieter Schneider recently built a 4x5 large format camera for wet plate photography out of plywood using his Shapeoko 3 desktop CNC machine. Luckily for all of us, he also documented the entire process on camera.
This is incredible: German photographer Lukas Fritz wanted an easier way to process his film at home, so he spent a year creating the Filmomat, a fully automatic film processor that can handle everything from B&W 35mm film to 5x7-inch color slides.
We've shared a number of projects over the years in which photographers create working cameras using wood, but we haven't seen a wooden lens yet... until now. That's what photographer René Smets of Lummen, Belgium, recently made, and the results are impressive.
Love someone who loves photography, and planning to pop the question soon? Check out this homemade ring box Matt Chalker made for his photographer girlfriend recently. It opens and closes like the aperture on a camera, and it took about 50-60 hours to make.
Photographer Arvid Larsson recently made himself a portable instant camera that's powered by a Raspberry Pi computer camera and thermal receipt printer.
The "Tri-clops," created by pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell," is the world's first multi-screen, wearable camera obscura. The device (and two extra I-scuras, as seen above) will be making the founds at several art and science festivals (e.g. Sidmouth and Green Man) in the UK over the coming months.
I’ve been taking photos all of my life. Something that I realize now started from a young age: I’ve been genetically disposed with bad eyes, but it was only discovered around the age of ten. This forced me to look closely at what was in front of me for a long time. Once I got tested and got glasses an entire world opened up. As a result, I’ve always looked at things and people with an appreciation I doubt I could’ve had any other way.
It’s a hunger to try and capture what I see in the moment as it presents itself, be it a theme or a feeling, a relationship or a time. There’s always a story to tell and that’s why we take photos.
Photographer and camera hacker Kevin Kadooka recently built a custom through-the-lens (TTL) light meter add-on for his Canon P rangefinder. Instead of carrying around a light meter with the camera, Kadooka can now get accurate readings straight from his modified camera with his impressively designed system.
This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.
Moscow-based artist Dmitry Morozov has created a strange DIY camera unlike any we've seen before. It's an 8-bit instant photo shooter created with an old Game Boy, a camera, a thermal printer, an Arduino board, and a gun.
Raspberry Pi project platform PiJuice is currently raising funds for its portable module on Kickstarter. As a demo of its capabilities, the team has created a step-by-step tutorial showing how the product can be used to build a DIY Raspberry Pi compact digital camera.
Starting back in May of 2014, I finally put my first foot forward in the making of a 16x20 inch bellows camera. The idea to build a camera was nothing new to me, but I was always hesitant to begin construction since I am the type of person that prefers to work off a set of blue prints and directions. Unfortunately, since my drawing skills aren't amazing, it was pretty difficult to visualize and plan a solid blueprint of the project - which ultimately forced me to bite the bullet and simply begin construction of the camera and problem solve along the way.
I recently made myself a DIY Spider Light as a thrifty alternative to the Spiderlite that costs hundreds of dollars. The entire project ended up costing $40 per light and can be built entirely with parts from a local home improvement store.
It turned out pretty well I think, with the added benefit of being bulletproof -- you can stand on the body without breaking it.
For years I’ve struggled with my workspace, I’ve had loads of different ones, from small ones in the corner of the living room in my old apartment to ones that take up my entire 3 metre wide office in my current house, they have all had their merits but most frustratingly I have never truly liked working at any of them. They’ve all had massive issues that have made working at them difficult and as a result they are hardly the most inspiring way to work in the office.
One of the most important decisions a photographer can make is picking a camera, and with all the different kinds out there, everyone has options. You can look up reviews, talk shop with colleagues, and take your time in the very subjective process of picking out the best camera for yourself and your needs.
But what about building the best camera for yourself?
How cheap and minimalist can you make a DSLR intervalometer? A camera hacker who goes by Glitchmaker recently wanted to find out, and the SHTTTRRR is the result of his experiment. It's a small low-power device that uses only an on/off switch and a button for setting the interval.
Photographer Dario Morelli is a computer aided designer and programmer by trade. Several years ago, during a period of unemployment, he began diving deeply into the world of custom-made scanner cameras. There's an entire niche of photographers who are interested in the idea of turning flatbed scanners into digital cameras.
What you see is the result of one of Morelli's experiments. It's a medium format camera created by stuffing parts from an Epson scanner into a custom enclosure.
Photographer Chuck Baker is a self-proclaimed "camera and darkroom equipment hoarder" who can't bear to get rid of gear even when it no longer works. Having a large number of enlargers in his collection, Baker recently decided to upcycle one of them by turning it into a working camera.
The large format camera you see about is what resulted from the project.
We've shared in the past how a broken lens can be used for "freelensing," or taking tilt-shift-esque photographs.
Photographer and lens hacker Witono Halim did this by buying a broken 50mm f/1.8 online for $25, sawing a piece off, and combining everything into a ugly-yet-functional lens with $2 of duct tape.
When you hear the words "retro camera," you probably think of some kind of silver or black camera crafted decades ago out of solid chunks of metal. But what would a retro camera look like if you kept the design the same but replaced its metal body with wood?
French photo enthusiast Cesar Sebouhian and his father recently decided to find out, and created the gorgeous Nikon "F2D" seen above.
Are you the type of person who enjoys using things built using your own two hands? 20-year-old Croatian tinkerer CroBuilder is like that too. He recently spent 10 hours in his workshop building a camera tripod from scratch.
This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.
Photographer Dominique Vankan wanted to play around with the old Autochrome Lumière process from the early 1900s, so he built himself a custom large format camera using LEGO pieces, cardboard, and duct tape.
Feast your eyes on this gorgeous twin-lens reflex camera that was designed and built from scratch by photographer Kevin Kadooka, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Portland. It uses a Mamiya-Sekor 105mm f/3.5 Chrome lens and has a Polaroid back for shooting 4.25x3.5-inch instant film, and is crafted out of laser-cut birch plywood.
This might look like a pile of garbage, but it’s actually one of the homemade camera used by photographer …
Artists Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs create homemade cameras out of bizarre objects …
Etsy shop soaprepublic sells flexible silicone molds for making homemade soap that's shaped like a DSLR camera body (with a pancake lens attached?).
John Sypal of Tokyo Camera Style spotted a photographer on the streets of Tokyo using this homemade lens created out of a potato chip tube. It captures photos that show the world in a glass-like sphere, with everything else blurred.
Faking toy camera effects with apps or software is a big fad these days, but Joel Pirela of Blue Ant Studio went a step further: he built his own homemade digital Lomography camera using some walnut wood, hand-polished aluminum frame, parts from a 5-megapixel Vivitar Vivicam, and an Olympus OM series lens.
YouTube user destinw — the guy behind the chicken steadicam (and …
Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that's about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that's about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.
Check out this bizarre looking homemade medium format camera spotted by tokyo camera style on the streets of Tokyo, Japan. That bizarre glass bulb you see sticking out of it is the 360 degree lens that projects panoramic views onto the 120 film inside the camera.