Looking for a cheap fog machine or fog juice for your photography? Hurry out to your local pop-up Halloween store today: David Hobby of Strobist reminds us that these seasonal stores often offer deep-discounts of those things once All Hallows’ Eve has come and gone.
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I’ve always been asked how I keep my equipment dry while shooting storms, and I figure with Hurricane Sandy on the way, now would be a good time to share! This is a very simple, inexpensive, easy-to-use, and effective solution to shooting in the rain! It costs less than 5 dollars, but I have never felt the need to purchase anything to replace it.
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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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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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If you want a 50mm f/1.4 lens for your DSLR, you’ll need to shell out at least a couple hundred bucks, even if you buy one made by a third-party manufacturer. For those of you who don’t mind losing autofocus, you can get the same focal lengths and apertures for much cheaper by buying some old glass and an adapter. By much cheaper, we mean as low as $10-$20! India-based photographer Brock Whittaker recently did this after seeing an auction on eBay for an old Mamiya camera kit.
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California-based designer Joy Kelley of How Joyful upgraded her camera recently and needed a new bag to carry it around in. Instead of buying or making a single camera bag, she decided to make a flexible padded insert that can be moved around from bag to bag. After creating a very nice looking insert and testing it out for a few months, she writes,

I have to say that I completely love my camera carrier, and changing purses is super easy! My carrier fits in all my purses, in some more tight than others, so when I need to carry more than just my camera I simply choose a bigger handbag, works beautifully!

What’s awesome is that her solution features moveable dividers just like the camera inserts you can go out and buy, which let you adjust the insert based on the gear you’d like to carry. If you want to try your hand at making your own, Kelley has written up a detailed step-by-step tutorial. The ingredients you’ll need are: some felt or fleece, canvas or fabric to protect the outside of the carrier, foam for the padding, a long piece of velcro, and standard sewing gear.

Camera carrier insert tutorial [How Joyful via Lifehacker]

Earlier this week, we shared a funky piece of camera equipment called the Bounce-Wall, which features a large card that serves as a surface to bounce your flash off when you’re out and about. While the pricing wasn’t available at the time, David Hobby of Strobist has since revealed that it’ll carry a $99 when it’s released later this month.

If you don’t have any free benjamins to drop on this product — or don’t want to wait — the fine folks over at Lighting-Academy have created a ghetto do-it-yourself version you can build and use. All you’ll need is an old wire clothes hanger, a piece of cardboard, some aluminum foil, a clothespin, and a tripod screw. The tutorial is in German, so you might need to use an online translater or base your build off the pictures alone.

DIY Wall Bounce for 99 cents [Lighting-Academy via Strobist]

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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For people looking to protect their belongings from theft in public places, there are bag alarms out there that can alert them (and everyone around them) if someone tries to pick up their stuff. DIY hacker Kip Kedersha (kipkay on YouTube) recently came up with a clever way to make one of these alarms for just $2.
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In this guide, you will find out how you can save money on film photography. I will go over five basic ways on how any film photographer can pursue their artistic dreams and develop their creative outlets without having to spend a fortune.
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