rig

DL Cade

Vu Booth Rig Lets You Quickly and Easily Turn Your Gear Into a Photo Booth

It's not uncommon these days for photographers to want to add a photo booth option to their offerings. In the past, we've seen everything from an awesome VW Photo Bus, to a portable battery-powered option, to an Instagram-inspired DIY project.

The Vu Booth is a rig that offers yet another approach. Made up of 4 separate parts, it allows you to put together your SLR, a monitor, tripod and a wireless trigger into a ready-to-use photo booth.

DL Cade

Create 360° Photos and Video Easily With 360Heros’ Plug-and-Play GoPro Holders

360-degree photos and videos are a niche market, but one that is growing. The ability to capture every angle, all at once, is intriguing to many photographers and videographers, but doing so is anything but simple. 360Heros, a pioneer in the field of 360° video, is trying to change that.

The company has come out with a set of patent-pending GoPro holders that promise to make it much easier to take 360° panoramic photos and video, and they've launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to bring the idea to fruition.

David Wilman

Digitizing Your Film Using Your DSLR

With the cost of my local neg scanner in London being £40/hour for a Hasselblad Flextight, I have been digitising using a DSLR for a quite a while. The results can be extremely good as long as a little time is put into the setup to begin with.

Michael Zhang

Focus Stacking Macro Photographs with a Hacked Flatbed Scanner

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.

Michael Zhang

Freezing Time and Space Using a Bullet-Time Rig of 100 Digital Cameras

Last week we shared a guest post by photographer Martin Legeer on how he built a Matrix-style bullet-time camera rig using 50 Canon DSLRs. Shortly afterward, Greek photographer Theodoros Tziatzios of Real Creations sent an email telling us about his own camera rig projects, which use double the number of cameras.

That's right: a camera rig with 100 cameras for extremely smooth 360-degree views of subjects that freeze time and space.

Martin Legeer

How I Created a Matrix Bullet Time-Style Rig With 50 DSLRs

Back in March, a client for whom I’ve done some light consulting work asked me if it was possible to capture a 360-degree-image that can be rotated afterwards. I said of course, but didn’t think that much about the consequences -- it's a project that would wake me up at nights for the next few months.

Michael Zhang

POV: Street Photography in New York City on a Rainy Day

Street photographer Markus Hartel recently did some shooting on the sidewalks of New York City on a rainy day with a Kodak Playtouch rigged to his Leica M9 and 28mm Elmarit. The above video shows a point-of-view documentation of his walk along with the "keeper" shots that resulted.

Michael Zhang

Mountain Biking Photos Captured with a Chest-Mounted DSLR

Many extreme athletes these days use helmet-mounted HD cameras for photos and videos captured from a first person point of view, but photographer Justin Olsen does things a little differently: he uses a chest-mounted DSLR. Using a custom rig created for him by a local sewing shop, Olsen snaps his unique photos using a 15mm on a Canon 1D Mark III or a 5D Mark II, and a PocketWizard to trigger the shutter wirelessly.

Michael Zhang

Strobist Jet Pack: A Ridiculous Looking Apparatus for Off-Camera Lighting

Photographer Jesse Rosten wanted a more efficient and mobile way to do off-camera lighting, so he invented this backpack-style apparatus that he calls "The Strobist Jet Pack". Although it's pretty ridiculous looking (it reminds us of Ghostbusters), it works well for placing lighting equipment in exactly the place needed while still being able to move about.

Michael Zhang

Extra Reach for Shooting the Moon

Now here's a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.

This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments.

Michael Zhang

Nikon D700 with a Custom Tilt-Shift Rig

When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940's at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.

Jessica Lum

iPhone Interchangeable Lens Mount

Jeremy Salvador assembled this strange contraption in an attempt to combine an SLR lens with the iPhone. Salvador created a prototype with an Owle Bubo iPhone camera mount, a 37mm filter with glass removed, a 37-58mm step-up ring, a Canon EF mount adapter ring, and a 35mm Canon lens.  Though he's managed to fit all the pieces together, he's been unable to actually take a useable photograph.