If you do any darkroom work, you probably regularly print contact sheets to peek at the positive versions of your B&W negative film strips. Did you know that your iPhone can be used as a quick an easy tool for this same purpose?
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Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably “mount” the gel to your smartphone? Reader Todd Glidden has an answer: use an index card.
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Don’t have any more babies to transport? Old strollers can be repurposed as a way to wheel your camera gear from place to place. Just load it up with your camera bag, tripod, lighting equipment, and accessories, and you’ll have yourself a mobile mini studio.
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Photographer Kirsty Wiseman didn’t want to shell out money for a real beauty dish — she doesn’t really need one — so she built this funny-looking DIY beauty dish for a few pennies using a couple of Styrofoam bowls, a couple of cocktail sticks, and a piece of aluminum foil. After playing around with it, Wiseman was delightfully surprised to find that her gear hack actually produced decent results.
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When filmmaker Ben Gill recently needed a way to attach his cameras to a car dashboard for a movie he was making, he decided to go the DIY route and come up with a makeshift solution. His resulting mount costed less than $10, and worked quite well. It was created using a car sponge (the kind that looks like a giant peanut) and some rug pad.
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Israeli photographer Ido Nassimi wanted to geotag the photographs shot using his Nikon D90, but didn’t want to shell out $200 bucks for Nikon’s official GP-1 GPS receiver. Since he had a GPS Bluetooth receiver lying around, he decided to do some research and make it compatible with his DSLR. He ended up successfully building one for around $50.
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If you want to take Lensbaby-style selective focus macro shots using your phone, go buy a cheap laser pointer. Photographer Zaheer Mohiuddin writes that the lens inside laser pointers (the one that focuses the laser) works well as a macro lens for the tiny cameras found on smartphones. After taking the device apart and finding the small gem-like lens, simply attach it to your camera with some tape to start shooting close-up pictures.
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If you need to do a quick shoot in the rain but don’t have a proper rain cover handy, you can quickly put together a makeshift one using a large Ziploc freezer bag. Photographer Kariann Goodkey over at Purple Summit Photography has a step-by-step tutorial on the conversion, which basically involves cutting out a whole and using gaffer tape to secure your lens hood to the “cover”. Goodkey writes,
If you are going to be out in the rain a long time you might want to get a proper cover to protect your investment though! That said I used this in over 6 hours of continuous rain sitting in the bush photographing a horse ride and my camera kept dry. After about three hours with this set up I did start to get condensation on the inside of the bag. This limited my view quite a bit through the viewfinder but I could still photograph and my camera was fine. For a quick shoot in the rain though this will work great.
DIY Camera rain cover [Purple Summit Photography]
If you’re in need of some quick image stabilization but don’t want to shell out the $16+ dollars it takes to buy a real one, an old broom handle can do the trick. All you need besides the handle — or a 1-inch wooden dowel, or a big stick — are a hex nut and hanger bolt for the tripod mount and a spiral nail for the base. MAKE has the lowdown on how you put the ingredients together to form “the world’s cheapest monopod”.
Want to add some custom tints to your photos without resorting to digital trickery? dainy over at Lomography has a tutorial on how you can create a simple color filter using some cardboard and colored transparency sheets. Combining thin strips of various colors can lead to pretty artsy effects.
Make Your Own Color Filter! [Lomography]
