DIY camera geeks have a new low-light option with the debut of the Raspberry Pi NoIR, a version of the popular camera module add-on for the single-board-computer that ditches the infrared filter on the image sensor.
A lot of people love the "vintage look" in photography these days.
Of course, it's one thing is to capture it with the plethora of software readily available -- or by applying "vintage filters" (like the ones on Instagram) to a digital image -- and it's another thing entirely to get old technology to work for us today and create photographs just like we would have done 30, 40 or even 100 years ago.
Sick of carrying your tripod separately from your camera backpack? If you have certain types of backpacks, you can add your own strap loop system to the bottom to serve as a makeshift tripod carrying feature.
In October 2012, astrophotographer Raymond Collecutt of Whangarei, New Zealand shared a new (and risky) idea he was playing around with: converting a standard DSLR into a sharper monochrome camera for photographing space.
Here's some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.
Web developer and photographer Nicholas Sherlock came up with a pretty cool customization recently. Inspired by Flickr's image montage layout that does proper justice to landscape and portrait photos alike, he took a stab at writing some code that does the exact same thing to any thumbnail gallery.
It was only a matter of time until spammers got ahold of Instagram, and yesterday it finally happened. Even though the Facebook-owned company hasn't yet made any moves into advertising, you may have noticed an awful lot of pictures of fruit on your feed this weekend.
That's because some spammers managed to hack many an Instagram account Saturday, posting random photos of fruit and singing the praises of a "miracle fruit diet."
Creating a 3D scan of an object can be done several different ways. We've seen everything from long distance laser cameras and hacked Kinects used to great effect. Computer engineer Giancarlo Todone's take on creating a 3D reconstruction takes another approach: using focus stacking.
For some filmmakers, the arrival of the Magic Lantern RAW video recording ability has become a godsend. With increased sharpness and a remarkable improvement in dynamic range, it's quickly become a much talked about topic.
But how does the RAW footage fare when it comes to bumping up ISO in those low-light situations?
With the availability of a whopping 1TB of storage space now available to users on Flickr, it wasn't long before someone out there found other ways to put 1TB of storage space to good use. That is to say, the uploading of files other than images.
That's just what Redditor rlaw68 has done, allowing the user to upload packaged files by essentially tricking the Flickr servers into thinking you're merely uploading an image. The process involves putting two files in one folder, a GIF image (though some users have been able to do this with other image file extensions) and an archive file (such as a .zip or .rar), followed by combining them to create what only appears to be an image file.
Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style "bullet time" footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.
NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan.
CyanogenMod is sort of like Magic Lantern for Android phones. It's an open source, replacement firmware option for people who want to get more out of certain Android devices. And the most recent update targets the photographic community -- in a hands-free sort of way.
Older Sigma lenses that were designed for Canon EOS film cameras often don't work correctly when mounted onto a new EOS digital SLR, even though the newer bodies still use Canon's EF mount. If you're an owner of such a lens, you might have heard that you can send it in to Sigma's service center for them to rechip it in order to make it compatible again.
Did you know that those of you who are handy with electronics can actually do the rechipping yourself at home? Photographer Martin Melchior recently did this with his Sigma 70-210 f/2.8 APO lens, and says that anyone with basic soldering skills can do the same.
Nikon's D5100, D3100 and D7000 all come with their own video time limits that keep them well below the 30 minute mark necessary to keep from being classified as "video cameras." That's because, as we've mentioned in the past, video cameras are charged a 5.6 percent duty that the manufacturers would like to avoid.
The D5100, for example, will stop you from recording once you've hit 20 minutes or 4GB, whichever comes first. In all honesty, most videographers won't see a need to record videos any longer than this, but if you do, the Nikon Hackers have released a hack that removes this time limit from the D5100, D3100 and D7000.
If you're the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there's something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.
At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams.
Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!
Here's a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn't give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.
Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects' eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects' eyeballs!
David Hobby over at Strobist shares a fantastic idea for photographers who would …
After shooting music events, Perth-based photographer Perry DeGennaro keeps the media …
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.
Last week, we wrote on how you can use LEGO pieces to keep your lens caps on your camera strap when they're not protecting your lenses. A reader named Fearn quickly pointed us to a similar tip published over at Sugru at the end of last year. Instead of using camera straps, however, they suggest tripods as a sturdy way of keeping track of the caps.
Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.
Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.
After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit -- the kind that uses disposable bulbs.
For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.
Alas, if it seems too good to be true, that's because it wasn't meant to last. As of now the app has been "discovered" by Instagram and denied access to its API -- no likes for you.
Lytro's groundbreaking consumer light-field camera made a splash in the camera industry this year by making it possible to refocus photographs after they're shot. However, the cheapest model for the boxy device has a price tag of $399, and the reviews have been mixed so far.
If you'd like to play around with your own refocus-able photographs without having to buy an actual Lytro device, you can actually fake it using a standard DSLR camera (or any camera with manual focusing and a large-aperture lens).
Back in October, Roger Cicala shared some first impressions of the Canon EOS M with us, and stated that he believes the camera is "a firmware update and a price drop away from being a great camera." While we haven't seen any major price cuts to the camera so far, a firmware update may be on the near horizon.
By "update," we mean "third-party firmware enhancement." Magic Lantern has announced that its firmware add-on will indeed work with Canon's mirrorless camera, and that they've begun the process of porting it.
Photographer Nick Cool came up with one of the strangest pieces of do-it-yourself camera gear that we've seen so far this year. He took an ordinary stainless steel sink filter -- yup, the thing that catches food at the bottom of kitchen sinks -- drilled various-sized holes through it, and stuck it into a filter ring after taking out the glass.
Samsung released the open source kernel files for its new Galaxy Camera late last week, something commonly done in the smartphone world -- at least with certain platforms -- but a foreign concept in the world of digital photography. This opens the door to all kinds of possibilities as hackers begin to peer into the cameras brain and dream up new possibilities for how it should work.
Developers are already talking about the possibility of introducing voice calling to the camera -- a feature Samsung left out of the camera, presumably to avoid cannibalizing its smartphones.
Here's a clever trick for if you ever need to print out a photo but find your inkjet cartridges low (or dried out): bust out your hair dryer.