How to Turn Your Tripod Into a Makeshift Music Stand
Love music just as much as you love photography? Want an extra music stand? You can make a makeshift …
Love music just as much as you love photography? Want an extra music stand? You can make a makeshift …
Beauty dishes are pricey, and so are dedicated cases for carrying them around. If you want a cheap and …
Wanting a cheap and compact way to carry, protect, and manage his SD cards, Instructables member …
In this short video, photographer Allen Mowery shows how you can create a …
Canon's 50mm f/1.8 Mark II is a terrific lens for its price, but its build quality definitely leaves something to be desired. Do a quick search, and you'll find legions of broken-hearted Canonites who had their 'Nifty Fifty' split into two pieces after accidentally bumping or dropping it. Flickr user tastygiant is one such Canonite, but he subsequently discovered an awesome use for the broken lens:
Being a geek, I figured I could use the broken pieces in the future, so I shelved it and bought a new 50mm 1.8 Canon lens. One day, while taking shots around my apartment, I stumbled across the broken lens again and decided to reverse the "barrel assembly" onto the front of my intact 50mm. Everything was blurry of course, but I noticed if I got very close to an object the detail came into view. After adjusting the aperture to around f5.6, I had a clear image.
It's important to note that you should switch to Manual focusing and rotate the focusing ring to "infinity".
Caleb Barrett wanted a simple ring light to play around with, so he built himself one for just $20 using built himself a makeshift ring light using eight cheap compact fluorescent light bulbs. The lights are pretty dim and have a horrible color rendering index, but are fun to play around with if you're just looking for something to experiment with.
Flickr user Twin-Reverb made this nifty DIY flash diffuser using a cardboard paper towel tube, a paper towel, and some aluminum foil.
Editor's note: Since we featured in back in August, Justin Jensen's Cineskates project has raised nearly half a million dollars. Here's a DIY tutorial by Ed Lewis on how to make your own.
Want to get a nice dolly shot without spending a lot of money? With less than $20 and a GorillaPod you can have an adjustable tripod dolly. You can adjust the angle, the direction, and the radius for circular dolly shots. It's also ridiculously easy to make. With all the supplies and tools, the build time here is less than 10 minutes.
Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
Want to add some simple panning action to a time-lapse video? Trying using a cheap IKEA kitchen timer. GetawayMoments has a tutorial on how to convert a $2-$6 timer from IKEA into a simple device for your time-lapse projects.
If you ever find yourself needing some quick stabilization when recording video with your DSLR, but don’t have a …
Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.
If you need a cheap way to bounce some light, don’t want to spend a wad of cash on …
The Coleman LED Quad Lantern is an area lantern that features four detachable LED panels that function as individual lights, with each one containing six LEDs, a handle, and a rechargeable battery. While it's designed for outdoor use (e.g. camping), it can also be used as a cheap solution for lighting your photos on the go.
If you have an old or broken flatbed scanner lying around and gathering dust, a neat thing you can …
Did you know that reading glasses can be used as a cheap macro lens for your camera phone? Make reader Sean Lee discovered this neat hack and wrote a short tutorial on the technique.
If you need some quick white balancing for whatever reason, and don’t have a white balance card or Expodisc …
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.
Here’s a “duh” idea that might not have crossed your mind: you can …