Hardware security guru Joe Fitz has successfully hacked the WU-1a wireless mobile adapter to be compatible with the Nikon D800. "Why would anyone want to do this?" you might ask. Well, to get the same features, you could also buy a Nikon UT-1 Communication Unit for $470 and Nikon WT-5A Wireless Transmitter for $580 -- a combined total of $1050. The Nikon WU-1a, designed for the entry-level D3200, costs just $58!
If you have an old plastic kit lenses lying around, something that you are not using for anything serious, you can give it a new life as a macro lens by removing the front element.
When Google upgraded its Android OS to Jelly Bean 4.2 a couple of days ago, the company unveiled a new camera app called Photo Sphere that lets you shoot 360-degree panoramas by waving your camera around. If you've been dying to play with the app on your Android device running the older version of Jelly Bean, but can't bear to wait until 4.2 officially comes to you, this should be music to your ears: the new 4.2 camera/gallery upgrades and Photo Sphere have been successfully ported to Android 4.1.1.
Remember the remote Instagram printer called Instaprint? Although the Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the product raised nearly a quarter of a million bucks from 800+ backers, it failed to reach its goal of $500K, and we haven't heard much about the device since then.
If you regularly shoot in dusty or sandy environments, here’s a handy tip for keeping your camera clean: create …
For those of you who are desperate for Olympus to release a focus peaking feature for the OM-D EM-5, did you know that there's a trick you can use for "ghetto focus peaking"?
A French photographer named Nicolas recently found that the camera's "Key Line" Art Filter actually works quite well as a focus peaking feature. Simply turn on the filter, set your camera to shoot RAW+JPEG, and focus/shoot away. You can throw away the artsy-filtered JPEG files afterward, but the RAW photographs will be precisely focused thanks to the clever "hack"!
If you do any darkroom work, you probably regularly print contact sheets to peek at the positive versions of your B&W negative film strips. Did you know that your iPhone can be used as a quick an easy tool for this same purpose?
Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably "mount" the gel to your smartphone? Reader Todd Glidden has an answer: use an index card.
After months of dedicated hacking, Magic Lantern has finally been released for the Canon 7D. The new alpha version of the firmware add-on introduces a slew of new features to the camera, including focus peaking, zebra stripes, magic zoom, spotmeter, liveview customization, image review tweaks, and much more.
Don't have any more babies to transport? Old strollers can be repurposed as a way to wheel your camera gear from place to place. Just load it up with your camera bag, tripod, lighting equipment, and accessories, and you'll have yourself a mobile mini studio.
Have an old Polaroid camera lying around collecting dust? Did you know that you can use it for wet …
If you own an iOS device, you've probably noticed that the Camera Roll in the native Photos app doesn't come with any way to mark photographs as private. For this reason, the App Store features a large number of apps (both paid and free) designed to offer that feature, allowing you to choose what to show and what not to when someone else is flipping through your photographs. If you want an easy way to "mark photos as private" without having to download a special app (or pay money for a fancy one), Amit Agarwal over at Digital Inspiration offers this simple trick: crop them.
On September 22nd, more than 100 developers descended upon Berlin to compete against each other in building the best photo app they could within 24 hours. After a long, sleepless night and thousands of lines of code, 27 new photo apps were born. Here's a look at the top three that won the competition.
Photographer Kirsty Wiseman didn't want to shell out money for a real beauty dish -- she doesn't really need one -- so she built this funny-looking DIY beauty dish for a few pennies using a couple of Styrofoam bowls, a couple of cocktail sticks, and a piece of aluminum foil. After playing around with it, Wiseman was delightfully surprised to find that her gear hack actually produced decent results.
With the advent of Internet-connectivity and apps in cameraphones and digital cameras, images can now be shared with others in ways never before seen in the history of photography. Unfortunately, not all of the ways are positive. Some are downright creepy.
Take PlaceRaider, for example. It's a malicious Android app that hijacks your smartphone's camera, secretly takes photos of your life, and uses those images to reconstruct 3D virtual spaces of private locations.
Ireland-based photographer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old broken battery grip into a small computer that can be connected to his Canon 5D Mark II. After buying a Raspberry Pi computer for €35, he modified the battery grip and stuffed the computer inside.
Big bulky cameras can be pretty intimidating when they're used to photograph young children. For a cheap and simple way to make yours a little more child-friendly, consider using a PEZ candy dispenser as a fun, attention-grabbing hotshoe accessory.
Snapping a photograph while driving isn't the smartest, safest, or easiest thing to do. How then should one go about snapping pictures of the interesting things you drive past without breaking the law or putting people at risk?
Caleb Kraft of Hack a Day has one possible solution: remote-controlled cameras that attach to the side windows of a car.
For those of you who have never heard of Magic Lantern (or know it only as a 17th century image projector) as far as Canon HDSLRs are concerned, Magic Lantern is a firmware add-on that first appeared in 2009 for the 5D Mark II. Since then it has been ported to most Canon HDSLRS and, for years, it has been known as a hack that brave and/or curious Canon owners have added to their cameras in order to squeeze out more functionality -- in some cases a lot more. The risk, of course, was always stability.
Sebastian Guerrero, an independent researcher in Barcelona says he's discovered a way to force friendship with any Instagram user -- private or public -- by exploiting an Instagram server-side vulnerability. In one case, Guerrerro forced Mark Zuckerberg to follow his test account. Then Guerrerro sent him a message through a photo post, which would show up in Zuckerberg's photo feed of people he follows. Guerrero also used a test account to follow a private user without the required approval from the private user.
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.
If you’re planning to hang a bunch of picture frames on a wall, Marissa Waddell of …
Michele over at The Scrap Shoppe offers this handy trick for hanging picture frames: hammer a nail through a clothespin and use it to determine nail placement. Simply hang the picture on the clothespin nail, figure out where you want to place the frame, and then push the clothespin into the wall to make a small indent. Voila! Target acquired.
Created by Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and …
When working with rim lights, or shooting into a significant backlight, glare becomes a serious issue. The typical solution to this problem is setting up flags on either side of your subject, but who needs flags when you have a spare piece of Coroplast sitting around your studio?
Want to attach your smartphone to your tripod without buying a special mount? Two large binder clips can do …
Have trouble figuring out exactly where you need to hammer in a nail when hanging up a picture frame? …
Flickr user Nick Cool was shooting in Machu Picchu, Perú on a sunny …
Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:
They're designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible -- the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.
Malcolm reports that the site "works amazingly well", making it "trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly".
Have you ever wondered why newer Canon DSLR battery covers have a small rectangular hole punched into them? It’s …