For the last 50 years, we’ve all had to live with the Hasselblad Super Wide C's flaws, its shortcomings, its chunky "industrial chic" looks and function. Like most everyone else, I’ve had the same thoughts and visceral reaction when it came to this particular camera.
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant cameras are pretty cheap — that’s why I’ve always wanted to hack my medium format camera to take instant photos with shallow depth of field and sharpness.
I really enjoyed reading the Photography: The Definitive Visual History and it got me thinking about blending older forms of photography with newer digital equipment. I became obsessed with TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) cameras -- not for their ability to view through one lens while capturing an image through the other, but for the style of photography that this type of camera forces the photographer to adopt.
Photographer Zev Hoover has created a rather unusual camera: it's one of the world's first 8x10 large format video cameras.
Albertino of Instax Magic created a unique camera that blends the old and the new. Half of it is made of LEGO, and half is a 90-year-old Zeiss-Ikon Trona folding plate camera.
When beautiful vintage photographic technology meets state-of-the-art photo equipment, the results are almost always interesting. Case in point, check out this frankencamera created by graphic designer Arber Marra using his Sony a7S and a 19th century lens he found at a flea market.
As iconic lenses go, perhaps no lens is quite as iconic as the famed NASA Zeiss f/0.7 glass Stanley Kubrick used to film a candle-lit scene using only natural light. In this video we get to see the lens, find out about the camera Kubrick modified to use it, and discover some of the tricks he employed to shoot that scene.
How's this for an unlikely couple: what you see here is a heavily modified Fuji Instax Mini 10 instant camera that has a vintage 4x5 lens mounted to the front.
Want to shoot digital photos with a Leica rangefinder without having to buy an expensive digital Leica M? You can do so by creating a digital back for a film Leica M.
That's what Eugene Zaikonnikov did over the course of a year, creating a digital back for his Leica M4 with the sensor from a Canon 350D DSLR.
There are only a small number of cameras on the market these days that allow you to shoot digital photos while manually focusing with a working rangefinder. These cameras also cost quite a bit, so they're not exactly the type of thing most enthusiasts can pick up on a whim and play with.
Ollie Baker wanted one, but instead of paying the big bucks for one, he decided to convert an old film rangefinder into a working digital rangefinder.
Photographer Brendan Taylor is currently working on an ambitious frankencamera project. He's trying to transfer the innards of a working Sony NEX 5N mirrorless camera into the body of a non-functional Nikon Nikkormat EL 35mm manual SLR.
Photographer Bryce Hoeper wants to become the Dr. Frankenstein of the camera world. Back in 2011, his experiments with mounting a 102-year-old lens to a Canon DSLR were widely shared across the Web. About a month ago, he created another cam-monster that combines old and new: he combined an old Speed Graphic 4x5 large format camera with a modern Fujifilm X-Pro1 mirrorless camera.
This Holga camera is named the “Holga-Cam of the Apocalypse” and is worth $24,000. Photographer …
London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4x5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent any light from spilling onto the sensor. Light from the Schneider Kreuznach Xenar 4.5/150mm lens entered straight into the open mirror box of the DSLR without any physical link between the two cameras. Wilman was surprised to discovered that this pairing produced quite a respectable macro setup.
Director Jason Bognacki had a Contessa-Nettel Piccolette German folding camera from 1919 sitting around on his shelf for ages, and decided one day to bring it back to life by attaching it to his Canon 5D Mark II.
Marc Levoy, the Stanford professor behind the “Frankencamera” project, teaches a …
Check out this fictional Nikon DSLR spotted in the British science fiction TV show Torchwood. It looks strangely familiar.