onthecheap

Food photographer Joanie Simon of The Bite Shot has put together a helpful tutorial that shows you how to capture "dramatic food photography" using an extremely cheap DSLR. Specifically, she picked up a used Canon Rebel T2i with a kit lens for just $200.

Lensbaby's creative selective focus lenses like the Composer Pro will run you around $400; even the relatively affordable Spark costs $90. If all of that sounds too expensive for your taste, you should definitely check out this hacked version Mathieu Stern created for just 30 bucks!

If you've done research into underwater housing, you'll know how expensive they can be. In some instances, they cost more than the camera. Certainly, when you pay the premium price you're also purchasing assurance, functionality, size, etc. However, rebel that I am, I didn't want to pay the premium, so I built my own.

With travel photography, one of the issues is prioritizing equipment. You simply can’t carry everything you could possibly want to bring; if you do, it often hampers the overall travel experience as you’re weighed down by equipment and have to constantly look after it.

Here's a simple tip that'll come in particularly handy for the smartphone photographers out there: you can use an old phone's LCD screen as a cheap, portable polarizing filter.

Ever since embarking on a cross-country move last August I’ve been meaning to display some of my cameras and, at last, spurred by a recent PetaPixel post, I finally did.

Below is a walk through of how I created ONE image for my portfolio, I will add some of the other images, but I don't have them in my portfolio. This is because this was the start of a series of images and I had set out to come out with only one from each shoot.

Shooting stereoscopic 3D images usually means breaking out a cool old film camera like the one used here, but this $30 eBay find from 1950 can make shooting 3D images on your DSLR as easy as shooting a regular 2D still.

High speed cameras that shoot thousands of frames per second are, in general, both big and expensive. But if you're looking for a much more portable and much more affordable option, and you don't mind trading in some resolution, the fps1000 might be the perfect 'poor man's' alternative.

Got $30, a frisbee and some free time this week? Need a ring light? If you answered yes to both of those questions, we've got a neat, quick and super simple DIY tutorial that's perfect for you.

These days, it seems that if you want to get a nice sharp lens, you have to spend $1000 on a piece of L glass. Aside from the nifty fifty’s of the world, there are very few lenses that deliver quality results at a low price. But if you look harder, there are actually a few old lenses that still offer amazing quality for extremely low price. How is that possible? Well, it is. Keep reading to learn how.

Want to make some great photos but don’t have or don’t want to spend a lot of money? A few days ago I posted photo of a Hummingbird on my Facebook page I took with a new Nikon D810 and a 85mm 1.8. I received a comment asking me “how much money do you spend on your equipment to get a shot like this?” Others comment from time to time that they’d love to get into photography but don’t have the money.

So, I thought, how close can I come to some of the shots I get with my Nikon D600 and the D810 with a really cheap used DSLR? The personal challenge began.

The guys over at HouseholdHacker have come up with and shared a cheap product photography trick that's incredibly simple but yields awesome results. And all you need to take advantage of it is some sort of reflective surface (they used a glossy black trashcan...), a computer monitor, and a smartphone camera!

Photography can be an expensive hobby to get into. With most DSLRs nowadays coming in at around $400 for even the lowest of consumer level cameras. By the time you add in accessories, the financial aspect can be a bit demanding for a newbie.

But just because it can be financially demanding doesn’t mean it has to be, as our friendly neighborhood DRTV stars explain in the useful video above.

Get out your Easy Bake Ovens and your polydimethylsiloxane, it’s time to make some lenses. Okay, okay... so it’s not that easy. But researchers at an Australian University have developed a new way to make extremely inexpensive, high-quality lenses by using nothing more than droplets of a transparent silicon and an oven to cure said droplets in.

We all know that almost any smartphone nowadays can hold its own against a proper camera when given to a real photographer with the proper setup. But is it possible for a smartphone to go head-to-head with the likes of a Hasselblad?

In a perfect world, we'd all have the studio of our dreams, and it would be filled with all of the best of gear. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world, and more often than not we're constrained by a (sometimes very tight) budget.

Here to help overcome that challenge is Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens, who has put together a video that shows just how easy it can be to build a very viable studio out of fairly cheap materials/products in a spare bedroom.

A while ago, we read an article about how gear doesn’t matter on PetaPixel, while at the same time planning a shoot that would involve a Hot Rod. Inspired by the post, we said, "Let’s do it with a Canon 550D and a cheap lens instead of the Nikon D800," because we really believe that all the latest cameras are quite good, and gear doesn't always matter anyway.