Enjoy playing around with Arduino and want to try your hand at making your own digital camera? Photographer Coralie Gourguechon has come up with a DIY digital camera called Craft Camera that consists of a simple cardboard body and Arduino guts.
Want a cheap and simple way to project photographs from your smartphone onto your wall? Photojojo writes that you can actually make a makeshift projector with a few things you might already have lying around. Total cost: $1.
Want to see how the highly-acclaimed Sony RX1 is assembled? At CES 2013 in Las Vegas last week, Sony showed the above video at its special press event, using it as a creative countdown clock for indicating when the show would begin. The split-screen video shows three of Sony's newer products -- the Cybershot RX1 camera, the Xperia Z smartphone, and an HD camcorder -- being assembled from their basic parts.
Back in March, a client for whom I’ve done some light consulting work asked me if it was possible to capture a 360-degree-image that can be rotated afterwards. I said of course, but didn’t think that much about the consequences -- it's a project that would wake me up at nights for the next few months.
We've featured photographer Nick Fancher's pegboard backdrop experiments a couple of times now (see here and here), and each time the setup gets fleshed out a bit more. Yesterday, Fancher released the above time-lapse video that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he constructed his "white room" inside his tiny basement (the ceiling is just 7-feet-hight).
Nanoblock is a plastic building block system that's like a shrunk-down version of LEGO. It has been growing in popularity as of late, and may soon become a fad on the level of Buckyballs. Japanese novelty photo company Fuuvi has partnered up with Nanoblock for a new toy digital camera that can take on all kinds of custom shapes and designs.
If you find yourself regularly shooting in the rain and in need of a better way to keep yourself …
If you need a tabletop photo studio for nice-looking product shots, a quick build involves using a piece of …
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.
Samuel Cox, the "maker of things" whose Minority Report-style photo viewer we shared last year, was recently invited to a friend's wedding. He came up with the neat idea of creating a TARDIS-themed photo booth for the wedding reception, an accessible way for guests to leave photo memories in a lighthearted manner.
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.
When shopping for a new computer, online shops often allow you to customize the computer and choose the individual components that go into it. If the computing world can offer that, why not the photography world?
Turns out you can with Leica cameras. The company has a website called "Leica à la carte", through which you can configure a film Leica rangefinder to suit your tastes and needs.
Mike Warren has written up an in-depth tutorial on how you can build a 360° camera hat using 6-8 disposable cameras. The cameras are worn around the head like a crown, and are simultaneously trigger using a single shutter release with the help of servo motors that depress the shutter when triggered. Warren writes,
With the camera array sitting on your head, you're able to capture a 360° panorama view of your surroundings. This project requires no special electronics knowledge and can be assembled in about an hour.
I designed this camera array off something I saw on the "Radar Detector" music video by Darwin Deez. But, after making the camera hat, everyone kept asking if it was a low-fi version of Google Street View. It's more the former than the latter, but people can draw their own interpretations.
We really enjoy DIY projects for photographers, and as such we've featured everything from the ultra simple to complex light-painting robots. But what excites us about Instructables' DIY tilt-shift adapter isn't just the durable plunger adapter you end up with, but rather the idea that one could manufacture their own camera accessories with a little bit of design skill and a 3D printer (check out Shapeways if you don't have one sitting around).
For this particular project you'll need a camera, an extra lens, some digital calipers, 3D design software like 123D, and access to a 3D printer or 3D printing service. After that just follow the steps in this video and you can wind up with results like the ones you see below.
Physics guru David Prutchi recently came across a line of professional grade gyroscopic camera stabilizers by Kenyon Laboratories. They cost thousands of dollars each, but Prutchi noticed that the designs hadn't changed much since they were first patented in the 1950s. He then set out to create his own DIY version using low-cost gyroscopes from Gyroscope.com. His finished device (shown above) actually helps stabilize his DSLR when shooting video or when photographing with non-image-stabilized lenses.
Photographer Allen Mowery has a step-by-step tutorial …
After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular.
Photography enthusiast Maciej Pietuszynski jumped into tilt-shift photography recently by building a do-it-yourself …
Talia van der Wel of New Zealand wanted a simple and beautiful way to display instant photos, and came up with the idea of an empty frame in which photos are hung on clothespins from twine. After sharing the idea with her husband, he went and created the frame out of an old wood lattice.
Check out this awesome picture frame: it’s an old french door that was cut in half, stripped, painted, distressed.
Want a super simple macro lens for your phone without shelling out big bucks? You can use 3D printing …
Last week we featured Jason Hull’s awesome nightlights created out of old (and cheap) vintage cameras. If …
Faking toy camera effects with apps or software is a big fad these days, but Joel Pirela of Blue Ant Studio went a step further: he built his own homemade digital Lomography camera using some walnut wood, hand-polished aluminum frame, parts from a 5-megapixel Vivitar Vivicam, and an Olympus OM series lens.
For his wedding, designer Matt Frank built this photo booth that looks like …
Photographer Tyler Card‘s uber-creative Nikon DSLR costume was the talk of the photo …
Many digital cameras are battery-only, and can’t be directly connected to an outlet for an infinite source of power.
Needing a portable light box, Instructables member HHarry came up with a ingenious …
Forget model airplanes… This Plamodel snap model kit is the one to buy if you’re a photo-enthusiast (or want …
Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.
Reflector mounts (the things that attach a reflector to your bike) are so cheap that bike shops often give …