Photographer Jesse Rosten wanted a more efficient and mobile way to do off-camera lighting, so he invented this backpack-style apparatus that he calls “The Strobist Jet Pack”. Although it’s pretty ridiculous looking (it reminds us of Ghostbusters), it works well for placing lighting equipment in exactly the place needed while still being able to move about.
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Surf gear company Rip Curl recently teamed up with Time-Slice Films to make a video showing surfers in “bullet time“. Rather than use a giant DSLR rig, they decided to make a portable rig composed of 30 GoPro cameras.
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If you ever find yourself needing some quick stabilization when recording video with your DSLR, but don’t have a fancy rig with you (or you’re in a place where you can’t bring one), you can use an ordinary tripod as a makeshift shoulder rig for some extra stability.
(via Reddit)
Image credit: Photograph by packman86 and used with permission
Now here’s a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.
This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments.
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When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940′s at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.
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Jeremy Salvador assembled this strange contraption in an attempt to combine an SLR lens with the iPhone. Salvador created a prototype with an Owle Bubo iPhone camera mount, a 37mm filter with glass removed, a 37-58mm step-up ring, a Canon EF mount adapter ring, and a 35mm Canon lens. Though he’s managed to fit all the pieces together, he’s been unable to actually take a useable photograph.
Salvador is first to admit that the “iPhone DSLR” is pretty impractical:
I realize that some people will be shocked and appalled that I would even attempt to Frankenstein together a DSL[R] lens on a crumby pocket phone camera. And I realize that this contraption will have no practical value. But for me it’s more of a piece of art than anything else. And I’m hoping to have some fun and learn something in the process.
Obviously, the design is pretty cumbersome, and you’d be sacrificing the standard DSLR’s 10 megapixel camera and sensor for 5 megapixels or less, on a tiny cell phone sensor. On the other hand, the idea of being able to snap a DSLR-quality image and be able to upload it instantly online or use Photoshop in-camera is nice, but you probably can’t get all that from the iPhone. But enough talk about what the iPhone can’t do — after all, you can make some amazing fashion photos with it.
(via SlashGear)
One major hitch when capturing video with a DSLR is that there aren’t many convenient or affordable options for stabilization tailored to DSLR gear. Jonathan Berqvist recruited the expertise of his father to create a wooden shoulder rig, but most people have to pay upwards of $300 to get a setup.
Habbycam now has a slightly more affordable SD Camera Brace, available for $250 from their website.
The rig weighs about three pounds and can support up to 20 pounds of gear, which makes it just about right for video DSLRs.
What’s especially notable about the SD Camera Brace is that the shoulder pad has special holes in them that can be used to mount weights, mics, and sound recorders. Again, a good fit for video DSLR shooters who probably won’t be using in-camera audio anyways.
(via Wired)
Stereo Portrait Project, by Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo, is a 3D photography exhibition documenting Australian creatives. Their version 1.0 rig used two Nikon D90 DSLR cameras attached to a custom camera rig, separated by a distance that is intended to emulate human eyes.
They tell Nikon Rumors,
To synchronize the cameras we used an RF trigger split out to two preload shutter release cables. We tested how fast we could sync both shutters together with the flashes, and got reliable sync up to 1/160 speed. Giving us the ability to have people move around, talk to us and not inhibit their performance. This was very important since hands in front of the body look fantastic in 3d.
The photographs were sorted in Aperture, exported to Nuke (compositing software) and tweaked, and finally combined into 3D photos. Here’s an example:
Sadly, you’ll need 3D glasses to appreciate these photographs. I just ordered a pair for about $1.50 on eBay, since it’ll probably be useful to have a pair lying around as 3D continues to explode.
The show is running at the Oh Really Gallery in Sydney, Australia from May 27 to June 10, 2010.
The BeetleCam is a remote controlled car that has a Canon 400D DSLR and two flash units strapped to the top. It’s the brainchild of brothers Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas, award-winning wildlife photographers based in the UK, and allows them to capture some unique photographs of some of Africa’s most dangerous animals.
William tells us,
We are brothers from the UK specialising in wildlife photography. We aim to use teamwork and ingenuity to take unusual shots of wild animals. Recently we embarked on a project to photograph African wildlife from a ground level perspective using a camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy called BeetleCam. We took BeetleCam to Tanzania and photographed lions, elephants and buffalo with it. The project proved to be a great success and we managed to get some amazing photographs from a unique perspective.
For more photographs from the BeetleCam, and some videos of the cam in action, check out the BeetleCam project page.
Image credits: Photographs by Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas and used with permission
Belgian photographer fotoopa (“photo grandpa” in Dutch) shoots ultra-high speed photographs with laser rigs he builds himself. He tells us:
I’m retired, and work inside in the winter making high-speed pictures of water figures. In the springtime and summer I’m outside to capturing insects in-flight. I have a mechanics (15 years experience) and electronics (26 years) background, but photography was always my hobby.
All of my equipment is do-it-yourself. Macro photography has always been one of my favorite types of photography.
Descriptions and diagrams of his rigs are posted for 2008 and 2009. Here’s a glimpse at one of his setups:
To capture insects in flight, his rig detects the insects using two crossed laser beams. This causes a “superfast electro magnet” to trigger the shutter, which opens and closes in less than 5 milliseconds. Shooting at f/22 and ISO 100, he uses 2 or 3 external flashes at minimum power to obtain sufficient light at so short a shutter speed. He adds,
For insects in-flight, a special second shutter system provides the short shutter-lag of ~7 msec necessary. There is also a high-tech IR laser system with an extra third macro-lens and internal AVR controller. In 40 microseconds, this system sees (via the reflected IR light into the detector lens) if an object comes in focus, and give the information to the central CPLD hardware controller that drive the whole system. In this manner even very fast moving insects are in perfect focus in the picture frame.
In the winter, the water figures are done indoors. First done in 2004, I covered a speaker with a membrane, and put a digital wave through it to move the fine colored droplets on the membrane. This provides wonderful images and an unlimited number of possibilities.
For 2010 I built a 3D stereo setup to capture all the high-speed macro pictures in 3D. The setup uses 2 DSLR Nikon cameras, the D200 and D300
To see more of these amazing photographs, you can check out fotoopa on Flickr or on pbase.
(via MAKE)
Image credit: Photographs by fotoopa and used with permission.
