DIY

The filmmakers over at Threefold have created a DIY battery charging board with a very useful twist: it's portable. And in the video above, they break down exactly how you can build your own version to suit your on-the-go creative needs.

I'm fine-art photographer Petri Damstén from Kuopio, Finland, and in this article I'll share how I created a tiny smoke machine from an electronic cigarette and 3D printed a part for precise smoke distribution control.

New Zealand-based commercial photographer Chris Cameron wanted an ultra-portable solution for supporting lights in cramped indoor spaces, so he created a simple 2-legged leaning light stand.

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.

Photographer, educator, and unusual camera builder Brendan Barry is continuing his educational series of isolation videos by showing viewers how to turn a backyard shed into a giant camera for portraits and other large format photography.

Weird lens enthusiast and YouTuber Mathieu Stern has created another fun stay-at-home DIY lens while stuck in quarantine. This time it's a functional camera lens, complete with focusing mechanism, made almost entirely out of LEGO bricks.

Dora Goodman—maker of gorgeous hand-crafted custom cameras like these—is back with another 3D-printed, open-source camera that you can make at home. It's called the SCURA, and it's a curved pinhole camera that shoots 60x25mm panoramic images on regular 35mm film.

Weird lens aficionado Mathieu Stern has created the rarest of camera lenses with the most precious of materials (in the ongoing pandemic): a roll of toilet paper.

Photographer Mathieu Stern has put together a simple step-by-step that will teach you how to turn your digital photographs into beautiful cyanotype prints. If you've never made physical prints at home, consider this your gateway drug.

My name is Antoine Loncle, and I'm an independent photographer. I shared my homemade 8x10 box camera on several photography groups and it received a lot of interest. I figured I'd do a little write up for anyone that wanted to know more about the camera as well as see some images of the building process.

The folks over at Syrp have just released plans for one of the most intense, involved, but potentially rewarding DIY projects you could possibly embark on: building your own professional photo studio with no corners, giving the impression of an infinite background—AKA: a cyclorama.

Photographer Brendan Barry has put together a detailed step-by-step tutorial that might help you stay busy while you're stuck inside. In this video, he'll show you how to take and develop photos by turning your bedroom into a camera obscura, and your bathroom into a makeshift darkroom.

You might have heard of the Pixelstick. “Nothing compares” is one of their tag lines. And this is true... at least price-wise. I have always wanted one to at least try out some light painting with it, but the Pixelstick retails for €400 here in Germany and $349 in the United States.

Our friends at SLR Lounge have created a simple little DIY tutorial that can help you add some creative flare to your portraits... literally. In 2 minutes, photographer Pye Jirsa show you how to make what they call a "flare ring" using some simple crafts supplies.

The GameBoy Camera is a cult classic, but finding paper for the GameBoy Printer that it uses is a pain. Fortunately, industrious creator Vaclav Mach engineered a solution that'll let you attach the GameBoy camera to any cheap thermal/receipt printer you can find.

Wet plate photography master Markus Hofstaetter—a frequent guest author on PetaPixel—recently embarked on another photography experiment. Using pebbles of sandarac resin, he made his own Renaissance-era varnish for his finished wet plates.

YouTuber Jordy of Cinecom.net recently put together a list of DIY filmmaking and photography hacks that are proving to be quite popular. In just under 7 minutes, he covers 9 hacks, all of which use cardboard to make the magic happen.

Vintage glass shooter and photography YouTuber Mathieu Stern recently got the chance to try Lomography's special LomoMod No.1 cardboard film camera and special liquid-filled lens—an ostensibly "fun" combination that turned out to be a nightmare for Stern, who has dubbed it "the worst camera I ever tested."

Anyone who has had any exposure to still life photography or studio work will know just how expensive backdrops can be. I have a couple from Kate Backdrops company, one of which I use very often, but I've been hankering after a few more.

For his latest project, Iranian photographer and camera maker Alireza Rostami collected 35mm film canisters and used them to construct the bodies of medium format and large format cameras. The project is called "Unity Camera."

I was recently offered a free Pelican case, and she seemed too young to die. She was structurally sound, so I felt some plastic surgery would make her look 10 years younger... and it did.

Professional photographer Karl Taylor has put together a short-but-very-useful tutorial that will show you how you can calibrate your lens autofocus without buying a special calibration chart or tool. All you need are a few household items, your camera, and your tripod.

As we know, wide angle lenses show a larger field of view and therefore make things appear smaller and further away than they are. Which contradicts the concept of macro photography, where we want our subject to be projected onto the sensor at a magnification ratio of at least 1.0x. So how can we combine a wide angle perspective and macro macro-capabilities?

Apple has released the fourth installment in its "Experiments" series, showing off the iPhone 11 Pro's camera with a stunning series of shots on the theme of "Fire & Ice," and then taking us behind the scenes to reveal how each scene was captured.

If you ever visited some industrial surplus shops, very often you would see some cameras and lenses used in industrial automation. What you probably do not know is that these lenses can have very high optical performance and features we want: high resolving power, large image circle, low distortion, and often very long working distance compared to some of other lenses we use.

Self-described "maker" and YouTuber Sean Hodgins of Idle Hands Development recently took on a DIY project that's way beyond most of us mere mortals: he built his very own, working, 1-Kilopixel image sensor. Take that Sony!

Did you know that you can make your own ground glass focusing screen? In his latest video, wet plate photographer Markus Hofstätter shows you exactly how by making a ground glass screen for one of his large format cameras.

Daniel Riley of the popular YouTube channel rctestflight has been building tiny autonomous boats, and recently he realized that the platform would be perfect for shooting photos for hyperlapse videos. In this 14-minute video, he explains how he made and tuned a boat for automated hyperlapses.

After getting his hands on two broken Lubitel twin-lens reflex cameras, Iranian photographer Alireza Rostami found that the shutter mechanisms still worked, so he decided to turn parts from the two cameras into a homemade dual-lens wrist camera for 3D stereoscopic photography.