If you're looking for a comparatively cheap DIY option for adding a variable speed motor to a standard slider (most often used to shoot those cool motion time-lapses), this tutorial is perfect for you.
Here's a good weekend project for those of you who have some old film canisters lying around, and a bit of DIY know-how up your sleeves. Those old film canisters done need to go to waste, with a little work you can turn them into tiny portable flashlights.
There's nothing like a gimmicky camera to make you tilt your head to the side and raise an eyebrow out of curiosity. The most recent gimmick to cross our desks is a camera that is equal parts advertising and DIY creation: an over-branded Sprite camera with a Raspberry Pi at its core.
Photo booths are seeing a renaissance in the world of photography recently. We're not so much talking about the photo booths you'll find at the mall, where you feed them a dollar and they take your picture. We're talking about little contraptions that pros are building/buying nowadays and bringing along with them to parties and wedding shoots.
One great example is the Instagram-inspired DIY photo booth put together by Alexander Morris. Unfortunately, that one required a bit of electrical DIY skill to put together yourself, so for those of you looking for something similar minus the DIY part, Photoboop may be the perfect solution.
When Milan-based engineer and photographer Andrea Biffi needed a constant source of power for his Canon 40D in order to shoot time-lapse photos over many hours, he decided to save some money by going the DIY route. Biffi turned a defunct lithium DSLR battery into a power supply unit that can be used with everything from a wall outlet to a car battery.
You can do the same thing at home, but you'll need a bit of engineering know-how to accomplish the hack.
Turning a retro satchel bag into a real photographer's bag is quite easy. All you need is an old camera bag (e.g. a LowePro one) with velcro inserts, scissors, super glue, sticky velcro stripes and, of course, time.
Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light -- way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market.
For those of you who use your Sony NEX-5N to shoot video, you may have noticed that longer clips …
If you have a Canon compact camera running the Canon Hack Development Kit …
Time-lapse enthusiast and electronics wiz Achim Sack came up with this super-small hardware-based …
Update on 12/9/21: This video has been taken down by the creator. YouTube user Prippman created this nifty follow focus …
Some battery chargers (e.g. those that come with Canon's pro and prosumer cameras) plug directly into the wall and have prongs that fold into the charger, while others (e.g. the Canon T2i charger) connect to the wall via a removable cable. Though this may be more space efficient when connecting to a socket or surge protector, the extra chord takes up space and can be a hassle. CheesyCam has a clever solution: use an Apple wall plug duck head adapter to transform the charger into a wall charger.
It’s been over two years since DJI released the DJI Mavic 3, an upgrade to their incredibly popular Mavic 2 Pro/Zoom series. In this new form factor, they redesigned the battery to offer a whopping 45-minute flight time, added Occusync 3.0 for better flight distance and stability, added 5.1K video resolution, added an onboard SSD (to the Cine version), and experimented with adding a Zoom lens to capture images and video at different focal lengths.
Many older film cameras lack a built-in light meter, but there are numerous solutions to this problem, including handheld and hotshoe-mountable light meters. Reflx Lab has announced a compact, affordable light meter in the latter style, the Reflx Lab Light Meter.
Comica has announced the CVM-VM30, the world's first wireless shotgun mic -- a claim that holds water when considering shotgun mics that have wireless functionality out of the box without any additional accessories or modules.
Sirui has announced the A100B Bi-Color Automatic Inflatable Photography Light, a distinctly odd yet interesting constant light source that includes self-inflation, an integrated diffuser, impressive color accuracy, and various lighting effects.
For anyone who has flown a camera drone, there is a lot of fun and excitement unlocked with the new creative angles with their ability to get views and vantage points otherwise inaccessible to a photographer on the ground. While learning how to fly them can be challenging, an epic new view of the area captured from the air is a worthy and exciting reward. Since so many makes and models exist currently on the market, which one is the right choice for you?
Australian company Yondaway has announced a Kickstarter campaign for the new Powchell Charger, a TSA approved portable 20,000mAH power cell that can protect and charge your gear while on the move.
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.
Nikon has announced the Z30 mirrorless camera designed specifically with video content creators in mind. The new 20-megapixel APS-C (DX) camera is lightweight, small, and packed full of features for vlogging and streaming.
So, you have decided you want to take your astrophotography to the next level… maybe you want to capture more detail in the Milky Way core, or perhaps dabble with deep space objects like Andromeda or Orion or maybe you came from my all-in-one astrophotography tutorial. Whatever it is, you know you are looking at buying a star tracker.
An industrious photographer 3D-printed replacement parts for his broken Olympus E-M1 after the camera froze in negative four-degrees Fahrenheit conditions while snowboarding.
Astrophotography. We hear the term tossed around a lot these days but what actually is it? The true definition of the word is photography of the nighttime sky. The sky only—at night.
Canon may have known cameras like its R5 have a tendency to overheat, and a new patent design shows that the company has created a unique external heat sink design to help keep them cool.
In a new video from Fotodiox, photographer Sean Anderson, he shows the results from using a long expired disposable film camera with pre-exposed, bachelorette-party-themed messages imprinted on the roll.
Battery technology has provided a plethora of ways to take power away from traditional wall outlets, including relatively small packs that can power photography lights. A man in China took that idea to the extreme by building a colossal 27,000,000mAh "portable" power bank.
The past decade has seen an explosion of film users. Whether this is driven by a sense of nostalgia, or a desire to experience the past (for those too young to have shot film earlier in their life), for the simplicity, or perhaps because some celebrities have taken to shooting film, it doesn’t really matter. The reality is likely a combination of many factors.
As cameras have rapidly evolved over the last decade, so have the requirements to get the most out of them. Specifically, what a photographer should care about when it comes to a computer has gone from simple, to somewhat complicated and often nuanced.
Inspired by do-it-yourself camera parts and projects, Ping-Hsun Chen and Ruha Cheng took things a step further and released a retro-style RUHAcam kit built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to the High-Quality Camera Module.
Thermal cameras are expensive. They can cost anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to buy and can cost $50 a day to rent. So why not just build one for around $100?
When I first heard DJI was bringing the FPV drone to market, I was excited but also a bit skeptical. Even though DJI's history in the consumer drone market is second to none, the company's offerings to the FPV market are a bit of a mixed bag coming from the perspective of a pilot from the racing and freestyle scene.
New San Francisco-based startup Framework has launched with the goal of fixing an "incredibly broken" computing industry, as the CEO says. To combat it, Framework laptops are an ecosystem of pieces that come together into a computer that can constantly evolve.
After making a fairly straightforward thermal modification to his new Canon EOS R5, maker/tinkerer Yifan Gu was able to get the camera to record unlimited 8K without having to resort to various timer resetting "hacks." All he had to do was swap out the thermal pads and add a couple more.
Waiting while flatbed scanners scan a color negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent color precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two.
Solargraphies (pinhole images on photographic paper that capture months of the sun arching across the horizon) were a thing starting sometime in the 2000s. When this caught on broadly in the early 2010s, it got a lot of people excited for film again.
After months of leaks and rumors, DJI has officially unveiled the Mavic Mini: an exceptionally light, palm-sized, foldable drone that's "portable, easy to fly, designed for safety and perfect for everyone who wants to experience the fun of flying."
In January 2018, I had the opportunity to test a pre-production version of Laowa's first lens in 2018, the Laowa 25mm f/2.8 2.5-5x. It is a niche high magnification macro lens touted to be the answer or alternative to the Canon MP-E 65mm for non-Canon users (especially Nikon macro photographers).
Film Washi V is probably the most unusual film announced in 2017, and I had the privilege of being present when Lomig, the founder of Washi Film, introduced it at the Salon de la Photo in Paris last year. Since then I have always wanted to try it and see what it's like to shoot with this very special film.
How much of a difference is there between using an expensive high-end lighting setup and shooting the same portraits with cheaper gear? Photographer Patrick Hall of Fstoppers made this illuminating 9.5-minute video that compares a $10,000 studio lighting setup with a $425 option. Can you tell the difference between the resulting photos?
Inspired by a list that I saw some time ago made by “gadget experts” (whatever those are) who chose the Leica M3 as the top gadget of all time and the original Game Boy as one of the top five, I decided to compare them.