Professional photographer Karl Taylor has put together a short-but-very-useful tutorial that will show you how you can calibrate your lens autofocus without buying a special calibration chart or tool. All you need are a few household items, your camera, and your tripod.
Portrait photographer Miguel Quiles has put together an incredibly useful video that reveals the contents of his personal 'Mig'Gyver Kit: a set of 21 items that could save your butt during your next portrait session.
After our flight to NYC got canceled last summer, we got stuck in Chicago for one night with no light painting tubes, no dress, no tripods, and no battery chargers. During the shuttle ride to the hotel, we started joking about using a bed sheet to fake a dress and to use whatever we could find in the hotel room as a light-painting tool.
If you ever need to soften your flash in a pinch, you can go the MacGyver route and fashion a diffuser for yourself using an ordinary piece of paper. They usually cost about $0.01 per sheet, so this is one of the cheapest diffusers you can make.
Jerry Ghionis is a man who knows how to make the most of almost any environment. Whether he’s in a proper studio setup or is trying to make the most of one of his ‘MacGyvered’ setups, he always seems to find a way to nail the lighting and produce an extraordinary photograph.
In the two-hour presentation above -- a recording of one of his B&H classes -- Ghionis covers almost every detail of his methodology for lighting images in tricky situations.
You might have found yourself in this situation before: you're in the middle of a photo shoot and you find that you badly need to set up a shot or lighting that is, in fact, impossible to do 'professionally' given the gear you have on hand.
So what do you do? You go all MacGyver of course! You put together an off-the-top-of-your-head DIY fix that gets the job done (even if it doesn't look all that good doing it). The Tumblr blog Shitty Rigs is dedicated to showing off those brilliant, if a bit silly, creations.
When the grip on his Canon Rebel T2i finally peeled and warped beyond repair, NYU computer science and mechanical …
Flickr user Nick Cool was shooting in Machu Picchu, Perú on a sunny …
Here’s a short video in which photo instructor Bryan Peterson shows how you can use sunlight and a simple …
Flickr user Twin-Reverb made this nifty DIY flash diffuser using a cardboard paper towel tube, a paper towel, and some aluminum foil.
Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.