Do It Yourself

Belgium-based YouTuber and DIY enthusiast Handy Bear has created a simple organizing station that lets photographers easily manage charged and uncharged batteries.

A photographer has perfected the process of creating real-life GIFs with images taken on 3D stereoscopic cameras that are then lenticular printed.

A man successfully turned his GoPro camera into a tennis ball to capture a POV shot of his dog Ollie catching it.

Photographer and e-paper fan Cameron Dowd has designed and produced a working Polaroid-like camera that records images on e-paper. As such, the "film" can be used over and over again.

Last year, PetaPixel wrote about photographer Ryan Kojima who built a DIY medium format camera using the CCD sensor from an Epson flatbed scanner. The DIY scanner camera captures massive, detailed 514-megapixel photos. Kojima built his first scanner camera a decade ago, although he recently upgraded it to deliver even better performance.

A photographer and filmmaker spent a year painstakingly handcrafting a stop-motion music video but then took just four days to make a second animated film for the same band using artificial intelligence (AI).

An industrious programmer managed to reverse-engineer the original Lytro light field camera firmware and opened it up to allow live streaming, full remote camera control, and custom code execution.

It is easy to see the camera settings for any picture taken on a digital camera or smartphone -- not so when taking photos on a film camera.

A photographer cut open a floppy disk to use the plastic inside as an infrared filter on his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera.

The Mitutoyo long working distance objectives are popular in macro photography, but often difficult to mount to a camera.

Raspberry Pi has announced the new Camera Module 3 in multiple variants that are higher resolution, feature autofocus and HDR, and that have the ability to capture both visible light and infrared.

Released in 1971, the Polaroid Big Shot was a funky, green plastic camera that was built for one thing: portraits. The plastic behemoth is simply designed, using a fixed focus 200mm, single-element plastic meniscus lens.

Australian photographer and avid DIY-er Jim Metcalfe recently decided to up his macro photography game by building his own stereoscopic macro camera to capture and create 3D images.

A photographer built a DIY medium format camera from an Epson flatbed scanner and shot a 514-megapixel picture with it.

A photographer had to wait two years for the temperature to drop to well below freezing to capture spectacular macro shots of soap bubbles freezing.

A team of photographers built a super fast f/0.3 29mm lens from a Leitz projector lens to shoot a beautiful short film.

Since the advancements made with mirrorless camera systems and their digital viewfinders, cameras with optical viewfinders have become somewhat rare, with hybrid viewfinders being even harder to find. This is why Getschmann decided to dive into his physics and engineering background to build one from scratch for his smartphone camera.

A photographer has renovated his 100-year-old 8x10 large format film camera after its original bellows began leaking light.

A photographer built his own wildlife pond with an adjacent photo hide so he could capture beautiful photos of flora and fauna.

Photographer and computer science undergrad student Joshua Bird has created a 3D-printed movie camera that uses "normal" photo film canisters, with the goal of letting him enjoy the nostalgic look of film video without paying for expensive motion picture film.

A 3D-printable adapter allows fans of the Game Boy Camera to use small CS-mount interchangeable lenses with it, which also opens the door to adapting much larger optics to the camera first made available in 1998.

A Redditor's 3D-printable pistol grip for cameras takes the phrase "point and shoot" and makes it a lot more literal.

A team of designers has created what it calls the Photon: a small, simple, light meter that is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico and costs a fraction of what most camera accessory companies charge for one.

A photographer came up with a novel way of protecting his lens when using a remote camera to capture rocket launches.

For those with family members who grew up in the 1980s (or earlier), a slide projector was a pretty common way to share and show images before the internet was a thing. But these days, finding a way to get people to sit and view these images in a dark room with you is even harder than finding a functional projector. To covert his old 35mm slides to digital, photographer Scott Lawrence built a custom digitizing system based on a slide projector.

This trinocular "wigglegram" lens creates vintage film-looking stereographs and is made with a combination of 3D-printed parts and scavenged disposable camera lenses.

The KineCAM is an instant camera-inspired "DIY" device that allows users to capture and create "animated" photographs (of physical GIFs) in the form of a kinegram.

As creatives are tasked with greater and greater volumes of work, accessories to help speed up their workflow become more and more valuable. While editing consoles can be incredibly useful, they can also be incredibly expensive, which is why YouTuber "Pedro" of DSLR DIY CNC has shared how you can build your own custom "InfiniteDeck" for just about $50.

A YouTuber has created "the worst digital camera of all time ever" consisting of just 48 photocells soldered to a circuit board.

Have you ever had a repeated inconvenience that finally makes you say to yourself, "Okay, I’m done with this garbage"? Well, that’s the exact feeling I had with using contrast filters on my enlarger. Anytime I wanted to use a contrast filter, I needed to use tape to hold it in place while I was printing.

A woman created an artificially intelligent (AI) infrared camera rig using a Rasberry Pi to monitor her cat's poop after she discovered it was eating plastic.

Apple's foray into digital cameras was short-lived but one photographer is still using his, only with a Nikon F-Mount placed on the 1995 camera.

Photographer Nicholas Sherlock 3D printed a $25 super wide-angle macro lens using glass from a CCTV camera and a 4x microscope.

A computer science student with a passion for electronics and photography has created a 3D printed 12-megapixel camera powered by Linux and a Raspberry Pi computer system named the PiCam.

Photographer Felix Steele has created a design for a 3D-printed 164mm f/2.5 lens that has no fasteners or screws, uses affordable glass elements, and can be built at home for less than $15.

Photographer and lens enthusiast Mathieu Stern has attached a disposable camera lens to a Sony Alpha A7 II to recreate the 1990s look.