While adding movement to time-lapse videos is cool, the special equipment (e.g. dollies, cranes, etc...) you need can be pricey. Derek Mellott couldn't afford to shell out hundreds of bucks for a dolly, so he decided to make his own using things found in his garage. His resulting setup included tripods, a cable management tray, a TI-calculator as an intervalometer, and a BBQ rotisserie motor to slowly pull the camera along.
Over at Leica User Forum, member dkpeterborough wrote a series of posts detailing how he and a fellow member of the Peterborough Photographic Society named Tony Lovell created a beastly 900mm lens. The lens uses optics salvaged from a government flight simulator projector lens, and cost only hundreds of pounds in parts (comparable lenses cost thousands).
You've probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That's exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.
Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn't until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made.
This foam core 8x10 camera was created by Daire Quinlan, the same guy that attached a 90 year old lens to his camera with homemade bellows.
The lens is an Industar 37 Russian large format 300mm designed for their FKD cameras. The shutter is a Sinar, takes standard 8x10 film holders.
Quinlan exposes onto photo paper instead of film, and focuses the camera by sliding the rear box forward and backward.
Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar -- he combined his grandfather's 6x9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.
Mats Wernersson's website is aptly named, "The Camera Maker". Wernersson creates his own custom cameras by hand, making everything from 9x12 field cameras to "frankencameras" created for specific purposes from existing bodies. The above camera is a 3D 35mm camera created by fusing two Konica FS1 bodies together.
Jonathan Berqvist needed a shoulder rig for stabilizing his Canon 7D when filming, and his father Erik is quite good with woodworking, so they built a do-it-yourself a wooden shoulder rig using a a single tree branch. What's awesome about the shoulder rig is that it has follow focus built into one of the two handles used to hold it.
If you want a reflector to play with lighting, but don’t want to shell out money for a real one, …