The MoMA Store used to sell these nifty salt and pepper shakers made from 35mm film canisters for $35 a pop. You might not want to make your own though — we hear you shouldn’t keep any food products inside used canisters because film rolls leak poisonous chemicals that can’t be washed out. Shucks.
(via Live Great on Less)
Claire Chauvin over at Poopscape has a fun project for those of you who have useless 35mm negatives that are lying around and waiting to be tossed. All you need is a cheap and simple lamp (Chauvin used a $7 Ikea Grönö lamp) and some glue (e.g. Mod Podge). Carefully glue the strips onto the lamp and you’ll have yourself a unique, personalized lamp that’ll liven up any room in your house!
Grönö Lamp Hack (via Lifehacker)
Chicago-based designer Dan Riordan woke up one morning, saw his Polaroid Land Camera 95A, and thought to himself, “I can make a lamp of out that”. So he did. Now, after several months of perfecting his build process, he’s selling these hand-crafted lamps for $150 through his Etsy store. The lamps are LED powered, last 50,000 hours without needing a new bulb, and are dimmable so you can adjust the brightness to your liking.
(via KEH Blog)
Tiffany Threadgould of RePlayGround had the awesome idea of building a room divider using old 35mm film canisters. She spent three months befriending film processing shops in New York and collecting the 1,000+ canisters needed for the project.
Read more…
Erik Pettersson was looking for a nice digital frame, but found that all the commercially available ones were too small, ugly, and cheap looking. He had an old Thinkpad T42 laptop lying around, so he decided to make his own custom frame. After installing Linux and writing some custom scripts for operating the frame, he disassembled it and joined it with a nice-looking IKEA frame. Best of all, he documented his entire process and published it online as a tutorial for those who want to make their own.
Have a busted lens that isn’t worth repairing? Instead of throwing it away, you can turn it into a flower pot! Kenneth Yung has a series of photos showing how he did this with his broken Nikon 18-55mm lens (translation here). This can definitely add a fun touch to any boring workspace!
(via Nikon Rumors)
A few years ago New Zealand-based Flickr photog fettucininz was looking for an easier way to position his flash for table top photography, when he found that his old desk lamp had just the right screw thread for mounting his flash. The resulting setup is ultra flexible and super cheap (it’s free, after all). If you have an old balanced-arm desk lamp lying around, see if you can repurpose the thing as a nifty flash stand.
Image credits: Photographs by fettucininz
As online stock photography services and libraries have expanded in recent years, stock photography books have become more and more obsolete.
Advertising and communications corp JWT recently came up with an idea to breath new life into these dying books by transforming them into tools to help teach disadvantaged children to read.
“My First Book Project” started in JWT’s Cape Town, South Africa office, and has spread worldwide through the organization.
To help solve the massive literacy problem the country faces, we have created “learner books. ” By writing descriptions of what is displayed on each page we can help children in these communities learn to read. For example if there is a photo of a man sitting on a chair, we simply write “man” and “chair.” JWT has partnered with the worldwide organization, The Global Literacy Project (GLP) to bring these educational materials to children and adults in Africa as well as India. It’s a simple, yet impactful solution that allows us to give these books full of beautiful images a second life.
As the Internet becomes more and more accessible for those around the world, the same concept could be applied to Creative Commons photographs online, which can be used as a learning tool to improve literacy.
(via PDNPulse)
Image credit: Photograph by My First Book Project
At the beginning of the month we featured a creative lamp shade made using slide film. Here’s a new idea: curtains. Jacki Vance-Kuss over at Yarn Zombie took Kodachrome slide film and aluminum chainmail rings and created a unique curtain for her front door.
Here’s the finished curtains I made out of Kodachrome slides! The slides date from the 50s and early 60s, and are all from a lot of slides I got in Kansas City last fall. The majority of slides on the right panel are of horses. Go figure. Travis drilled 8 holes in the slides using a Dremel tool in a Dremel drill press thingy, and I connected them all using aluminum chainmail rings.
The curtains open and close just like you would expect:
In response to the whole “Won’t it fade?” question, I’m pretty sure that yes, in time, the slides (especially the ones in direct sunlight) will fade. I don’t know how long they’ll last. If it happens in the next week or so, I’ll let you know. :) Hopefully, they’ll last a year or so. I have a ton of old slides, so as they fade, I can just replace them with others. That won’t be any big deal. I think if this was on a north-facing window, the slides will fade a lot slower. Also, I scanned in the most interesting slides, so in case the slides to fade to nothingness, the image is still preserved.
If you have old Kodachrome slide film that you’d like to recycle, this could be a fun project for you.
(via Lifehacker)
Image credits: Photographs by yarnzombie and used with permission.
If you have slides you’re planning on throwing away, why not upcycle them into a unique lamp shade? New York based artist and design Sabina Batelman did just that with hers.
Batelman tells us:
I was into slide photography some time ago and ended up with all these cutting room floor slides that were hard to throw away. Happily, the idea of the lampshade sort of came to me without much thought. Seemed like the most logical thing to do with them. Slides. Light. Need lampshade.
I used a few coats of thin green and brown acrylic paint. Though I’m experimenting now with thicker acrylics to eliminate the need for multiple coats. Keeping the paint off the images was a bit of pain at first, but I eventually got better at it. I bought a bunch of metal rings from the jewelry making department at Michael’s and used a power drill to make the holes. The frame is from a junky $2 lampshade bought from a local thrift store. I cut the shade off and hung the linked slides on. Pretty simple. A bit tedious, but quite therapeutic.
Making another one now. Have a lot of slides. Need more lampshades.
