DIY

This short 2-minute video from photographer Svitlana Vronska demonstrates some clever lighting tricks you can use to add some creative flair to your images with an otherwise uninteresting backdrop.

Back in August 2016, the Blue Cut wildfire tore through Cajon Pass in Southern California, burning 37,000 acres, dozens of cars, and over 300 homes and structures. Local photojournalist James Quigg documented the fire's damage in a creative and unusual way: he found a burned teapot and turned it into a pinhole camera.

Nearly every professional studio I’ve ever used has these "polyboards" and you‘ve probably even seen them yourself but may not have known what they’re used for. Polyboards are polystyrene boards that usually measure 4 feet wide by 8 feet high and are normally 2 inches thick. One of the other defining characteristics is that they are often white on one side and black on the other.

There are plenty of tutorials on the web for how to create DIY ring lights, but this build has a unique take. The 10-minute video by Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter will take you through the steps required to build a triangular “ring” LED light that can be dimmed.

With the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017, only weeks away, I decided to put together some solar filters. With the high travel costs to get to the eclipse from Southern California, I saved some money through purchasing solar filter sheets instead of the pre-made filters.

Bored of the standard camera strap that came with your camera? In this 37-minute video by Nick Exposed, learn how to upcycle old leather belts into stylish camera straps.

High-end photo backdrops can cost over $1,000 apiece. When photographer Jeremy Cowart couldn't find a backdrop he needed a few days ago, he had an idea: Cowart drew his own backdrop on an iPad Pro and printed it out at 40x80 inches on a $4,000 professional Canon printer.

Here’s a quick DIY video from Kyle Martin on how to create an extremely powerful suction mount for your GoPro instead of buying GoPro's $40 suction mount. The video is 6 minutes and will show you how to create the mount for around $20 in materials.

Photographer Joey Ready wanted to take his Super 8 film camera into the water to snap some clips of surfers. There aren't any underwater housings designed for his old Canon camera, so he fashioned his own. The video above is what resulted.

I'm as interested in an "easy life" as much as the next person, so if somebody else has already done the hard work of making a product for me, and I can purchase it for a reasonable price, I'm all over it. After all why make life hard for yourself if you don't have too. Unfortunately there are times when you literally can't purchase what you need and the only option is to get all arts-and-crafts on the problem!

Beauty dishes are great pieces of equipment to have in your lighting arsenal, but they come at a price. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a dish, yet using a cheap shoot-through umbrella can easily produce the same effect, as this 10-minute tutorial by Joe Edelman shows.

"Camera obscura" refers to a device for viewing an image that makes use of the principles of pinhole imagery, and is usually made with a box of sorts. It's this that was eventually turned into the first pinhole camera - and now you can make your own!

Some cameras are more prone to overheating than others, leading some photographers and videographers to come up with creative solutions for keeping their sensors cool. Industrial designer Eric Strebel came up with a solution that looks pretty unusual: he customized a computer heat sink so that it can be mounted to the back of a Panasonic GF7.

Here's a neat idea for light painting photos: if you build a custom light tube using a certain type of reflective metallic material, your photos will look like they're filled with rainbows.

If you often shoot with your camera tethered, there are commercial solutions out there for taking the stress off your camera and cable and protecting the cord from getting yanked out. But if you'd rather not spend your hard-earned money on such a product, an ordinary rubber band can do the same thing.

Action shots of cars in movement are often taken with a ‘car rig’ – basically a long pole that is attached to the car, with a camera mounted on the end. A professional car rig can cost in the thousands, but this 13 minute video from Practical Photography will teach you to make your own for under $40.

Are you a keen DIY hand? This do-it-yourself pinhole camera is the brainchild of Kelly Angood. This is her third project involving pinhole cameras, and it's something that she's had great success with in the past.

Mounting a monitor on your DSLR usually means using an articulating ball mount, which is fiddly and impossible to adjust with one hand. Caleb Pike shows how to build a freely adjustable mount using GoPro parts in this 5 minute video.

Have you ever found yourself sitting and watching someone browsing through their travel snaps, flitting between endless folders on their computer? No one likes looking at someone else's holiday snaps, but Caroline Buttet wants to change that with her interactive globe project.

In this creative 2-minute tutorial, Ukranian photographer Anya Anti demonstrates how to make an interesting bokeh effect using shapes cut out of a paper backdrop.

The idea of cleaning the sensor on your camera is a frightening prospect for many photographers, but it needn’t be. This 2-minute video will show you how to shake that fear and banish dust, dirt, and oil from your sensor’s filter glass for good.

Ready to get creative this weekend? Good, because our friends at COOPH are back with 9 creative photography tricks you can try out at home when you have a spare minute. From making your own glitter "snow," to magnifying glass macro and beyond, there are some really fun tips in here.

Macro photography can be incredibly expensive, but as British photographer Adam Kappa shows in this video, it doesn't have to be. In 7 minutes, Kappa demonstrates how to produce impressive macro shots using kit lenses, extension tubes, and a flash diffuser crafted from a Chinese takeout container.

In this 8-minute video by Macroscope Pictures, learn how to build a color changing wand light with your own two hands for only $30 in materials. For an extra 15 bucks, you can add a Wi-Fi controller and control the finished product with your phone.

Need something fun to build this weekend? This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to turn an old bicycle wheel and some fabric into a simple DIY softbox that you can use for photography or, just as a cool studio accent light.

I recently found myself with a spine injury, which proved to kinda be a big road block to my photography. My photo projects usually involved lots of driving and walking, two things that proved to be extremely painful due to my crappy health. One day, sitting around bored, I decided to create a camera that was as immobile as I was. Armed with a rough sketch, and a misguided sense of self-confidence, I built a 20x24 camera over a weekend.

I needed a monitor hood for quite some time but wasn't willing to pay the retail prices charged for them, so I decided to build one myself. In this tutorial I'll show you how to build your own DIY monitor hood for less than $12.