Do It Yourself

When visiting Lancaster, Pennsylvania recently, Portland, Oregon-based photographer Lindsey Boccia made the mistake of not bringing her camera bag along for the journey. Boccia wanted to play around with analog photography, so she decided to buy some disposable cameras.

A quick visit to a nearby camera shop netted her four one-time-use cameras for about $6 each. She then "distressed" them to turn them into experimental lo-fi toy cameras.

Earlier this year I tried Polaroid emulsion lifts for the first time. An emulsion lift (or emulsion transfer) is when the emulsion layer is removed from a sheet of instant film and then transferred to a different surface.

I’ve always thought they would be hard to do and was surprised at how easy and fun it was, so I thought I’d put together a little step by step guide to making instant film lifts!

A couple of days ago, we shared a great little DIY project by Phoenix-based photographer Dan Tabár. Since he sometimes has to shoot on quiet soundstages where camera noise is not an option, he created a makeshift sound blimp for his Nikon D800 for only about $80 -- a professional sound blimp would have run him closer to $1,000.

As it turns out however, his DIY creation has another function. As you can see from the test video above, it doubles as a poor man's underwater housing!

The magic of 3D printing has led to the creation of a few pretty cool DIY projects we've featured in the past. In the world of cameras, we've seen everything from lens adapters to flash diffusers make their way into the real world via the 3D printer and some plastic.

What we had never seen before now, however, was a fully operational 3D printed SLR camera, but freshly graduated design student Léo Marius has created just that!

Photographer Justin Quinnell is a pinhole photography master. Over the years we've featured his work taking six-month long pinhole exposures that show sun trails, as well as his DIY camera obscura kit that allowed you to display an upside-down version of the outside world in the room of your choice.

His latest project, however, is different from any we've seen before. Meant to be used as a game on the festival circuit, the I-Scura (as he calls it) is a massive DIY camera obscura you wear on your head like a helmet.

Creating time-slices (better known as the bullet time effect) where you freeze a moment in time and move around your subject is an expensive thing. It's expensive mainly because it requires that you have several cameras at your disposal.

Photographer Jeremiah Warren didn't have multiple cameras, but he did have a ceiling fan, a two-by-four and a GoPro Hero3, so he built a makeshift "bullet time" DIY rig and made do.

Want to make some business cards for your photography business that stand out from among traditional cards? Try making some in the style of 35mm film slides. Last week we shared photographer Lars Swanson's beautiful slide cards, and this week we have a step-by-step look at how you can make something similar.

Pinhole cameras can be easily and cheaply made using things you have lying around the house... or you can go to the opposite end of the spectrum and fashion yourself a highly intricate pinhole camera. That's what Korean photographer Kwanghun Hyun did with his Heartbeat cameras. The two cameras created so far feature one crazy design choice: they use intricate watch movements as their internal timing mechanisms.

You may have seen built-it-yourself 35mm pinhole cameras before, but have you ever seen a DIY SLR? Lomography today announced the Konstruktor, a camera it calls "the world's first 35mm do-it-yourself" SLR camera. If you loved building model airplanes as a kid, this is one camera kit you're going to love.

Phoenix-based photographer Dan Tabár sometimes shoots on sound stages, sets, and quiet studios -- locations where a loud camera would either cause problems or cause angry glares and murderous thoughts. Needing a way to surpress the shutter sound of his Nikon D800 -- he says the "quiet mode is a joke" -- Tabár decided to create his own DIY sound blimp.

Raspberry Pi's new Camera Module is starting to hit store shelves, and we're starting to see some interesting photo experiments being done with the simple programmable camera kit.

High altitude ballooning enthusiast Dave Akerman recently decided to send his $25 module up to the edges of space to snap photographs of Earth and beam images back during its flight.

A bit of clever thinking from San Francisco Instructables member Amanda Ghassei has produced some really creative 3D-printed images from nothing but old photographs.

Printed using an Objet Connex 500, Ghassei's creations are still meant to be viewed in 2D, but are textured to create an interesting silhouette effect.

In order to properly view them, they must be backlit with a diffuse light. Images used for printing were first converted to black and white, and according to Ghassei, "each individual greyscale pixel value of an image to thickness," which effectively allows for the printing of any greyscale image.

Here's a question I get asked about 15 times a week: “How can I get the dust out of my lens?” The right answer is you don’t. All lenses have dust in them and it doesn’t affect the images at all 99% of the time. Even if you clean it all out, it will be back after you use the lens a few times.

Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style "bullet time" footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.

NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan.

Dublin, Ireland-based photographer Maciej Pietuszynski was doing a bit of spring cleaning recently when he decided to upgrade a plastic box he has been using to carry his camera and flash unit. His idea was to give the box an extra job as a makeshift softbox in addition to its storage/transportation/protection duties.

Originally produced for the US military in WW2, the Kodak Aero Ektar 178mm f/2.5 is a large-format monster of a lens. Mounted in bombers, facing down at Europe, this lens was sold to the US government for the price of a family car. It found its way into military surplus after the war, and was widely used in journalism and by professional photographers.

Wireless connectivity is one of the hot features in the camera world these days, and many (if not most) new cameras either have built-in wireless connectivity or an optional wireless adapter that provides the feature. Unfortunately, the wireless adapters are often quite pricey, especially for higher-end cameras.

Here's something neat that you might be interested in knowing if you shoot with a Canon 1D X: you can connect a cheap WiFi adapter designed for homes and offices to give your camera wireless tethering!

Lebanese photographer Alexy Joffre Frangieh is a professional time-lapse creator, and often puts his camera gear in extremely hot environments to create his shots. In order to help dissipate heat, he decided to give one of his kits a custom paint job. The resulting kit looks like something a military might officially assign its combat photographers.

More and more photographers are attempting to build their own DIY lightboxes these days as they look for ways to easily digitize their film at home using a digital camera. However, a common problem that plagues these lightboxes is vignetting -- lighting is uneven and shadows form gradients near the edges of the surface.

Photographer Rafał Nitychoruk of Gdynia, Poland tells us that he has solved the problem with his own custom lightbox. The trick? Make your lightbox short, and stack multiple layers of glass.

Marta Crass of Knoxville, Tennessee is quite handy with cardboard. She runs an Etsy shop called CisforCardboard that's dedicated to her custom cardboard art. She handcrafts signs, wall hangings, letters, and anything else you can dream up... including cameras.

What you see here is a replica of Crass' grandfather's 1960's era Nikon F SLR, created using ordinary pieces of cardboard.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a pretty nice flash diffuser for your macro setup for just a little time and a little money.

Using just a few pieces of wood, some serious DIY know-how and an Arduino, photographer and Instructables user Alexander Morris built this really cool, Instagram-inspired photo booth as a fun extra for events and parties. Fortunately for us, he uploaded a ton of pictures and instructions so that anybody with a little bit of time and skill can put one together for themselves.

Westcott's lightsaber-style Ice Light is popular among photographers, but the $500 price tag is a bit prohibitory to some. Fortunately for those who either don't want or can't afford to spend the money on the real thing, photographer Simon Ellingworth has come up with a cheap DIY version that'll only run you about $30.

A little while ago, we introduced you to photographer Ed Pingol's Cullinator, a Mac app that played nice with a PC gaming controller and helped you to significantly speed up your Lightroom workflow. As many of you pointed out, however, the Cullinator could easily be turned into a DIY project, and it looks like photographer Paul Snow of Photo Thoughts was listening.

In a step-by-step blog post, Snow details how to take a $25 Logitec F310 GamePad and customize it using the pad's own profile tool until it works with Lightroom.

Flect is a simple device I developed to take photos through glass without reflections or glare from the surrounding environment. Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to make one for yourself.

Canadian photographer and DIY enthusiast Matt Bechberger wanted to improve the ergonomics of his Mamiya 645 medium format camera without shelling out money for an "expensive, hard to find, and ugly" grip, so he decided to make his own. He ended up creating a beautiful custom wooden grip that attaches to the bottom of the camera and features a shutter release at the top.

London-based photographer Kelly Angood has had quite a tumultuous year so far in 2013. Last month she announced that she would be turning her popular cardboard medium format camera design into a proper do-it-yourself kit. After launching a Kickstarter campaign to take preorders, she quickly raised over £23,000 (~$34,000) from over 600 supporters.

However, the fact that her camera was based on Hasselblad's famous design turned out to be a dealbreaker. After being informed that she was putting herself at risk of a lawsuit, Angood decided to cancel the project and turn her back on the money. Now, one month later, she's at it again with a different (original) camera design and a new camera kit Kickstarter campaign.

When it comes to protecting our gear, we tend to go for the expensive because, as they say, "you get what you pay for." But once in a while, a simple idea that helps you save a few bucks may not be such a bad thing.

We've shared a few DIY rain guards before -- they usually involved some sort of clear plastic bag and tape -- and even though those were simple enough in their own right, HDSLRNOW's makeshift rain cover makes them all seem a bit complicated.

Here's something that may not be relevant to most of you, but if you enjoy dabbling in do-it-yourself gear hacks you might find it interesting. Milan-based photographer and freelance engineer Andrea Biffi came up with an interesting way of creating a shutter release cable connector for his Canon DSLR. Instead of buying an actual remote and slicing off the plug end, he decided to cast his own out of hard rubber.

My name is David Lo, and I am a street photographer who enjoys taking vintage cameras, digitizing them, and then using them for street photography. This is a walkthrough on my process of modifying a camera.

Here's a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn't give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.

This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.

Photographer Váncsa Domokos created a neat do-it-yourself camera accessory that uses optical fibers to control the direction and intensity of a flash unit's light. Instead of having light come directly out of the flash unit, the accessory redirects it through a thick bundle of optical fibers, allowing you to point the light in any direction -- and in different directions if you'd like.

In the past, we've shared how you can create a cheap and simple rain cover for your camera and lens using a Ziploc bag. While that solution is effective in protecting your gear, it might make it a bit difficult to adjust your lens and operate the rings.

If you'd like a little more access to your lens, you can also create a rain guard using the plastic cylindrical cover that comes with writable optical discs.

Newer Leica lenses have a special lens code on the mount flange of each lens that informs the camera of what's mounted on it, and allows lens-related EXIF data to be embedded inside photographs. If you have an older Leica lens or a third-party lens on your hands, you might not have this special code, but did you know that you can apply the code manually to a code-less lens using black and white paint?

La Vida Leica! has published a tutorial showing how simple the process is: it only takes around $15 and 15 minutes to do.

Here's another creative way to put those thousands of archived Instagram shots to some practical use, courtesy of the folks over at Photojojo. A fun DIY project, this step-by-step will show you how to turn the window of your choice into a stained glass-inspired photography display.

Here's a cheap, long-lasting DIY option for those of you in need of another backdrop and/or reflector for your studio shoots. Put together by photographer Tiffany Angeles, this short video shows you all of the materials you'll need to create your own sturdy backdrop/reflector combo in the comfort of your own home.

A few years ago, photographer Samuel Chapman of The Rocket Factory found himself with an annoying problem on his hands. After purchasing a number of neutral density filters for his DSLR, he found that Nikon's $2,000 14-24mm lens didn't have any good way of being used with a filter.

He had already paid hundreds of dollars each for his fancy filters, so he decided to make a makeshift adapter for the 14-24mm lens... using a sponge. The result is a product Chapman calls the "FX Sponge Filter Holder 5000."

It’s fairly well known that not all lenses are created equal. Put that in combination with manufacturing variables and lenses don’t always perfectly align with the camera mount. Generally the differences are minor and for the most part negligible, but I buy old Minolta lenses from eBay and I want to get the best bang for buck out of them.

I started making micro adjustments to my lens/camera combinations when I first got Sony’s a77, and have now micro adjusted all my lenses for the a99 and D3. After reading what the Internet had to offer regarding “micro adjustment” or the “fine tune” functions higher level DSLRs offer, I quickly printed off some charts similar to rulers and taped them to my wall to start making adjustments.

Remember that beautiful cardboard Hasselblad created by designer Kelly Angood a couple of years ago and released as a PDF template? If you'd like to build your own but don't want to go through the trouble of printing the design onto cardboard and cutting out the pieces, you'll be glad to know that Angood is working on launching a do-it-yourself kit for the camera.

Here's a thrifty DIY idea courtesy of Netherlands-based photo enthusiast Rob Gipman. After getting rain on his lens a while ago, Gipman decided to take an unwanted piece of water-resistant fleece and make a do-it-yourself covering for his Canon 100-400mm lens.

When I started planning a series titled DreamWorld, one of the first characters that came to me was a dryad: a nature spirit representing our connection with nature. I saw her as a strong, benevolent queen, keeping watch over the woodland creatures and protecting them. The first concept I came up with that made my heart pitter-patter with excitement was the idea of building a huge crown for her from sticks and branches. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this, but I had a vision. And I have learned over the years that having a vision will pave the way to making it a reality, regardless of if I know how that will come about.

David Hobby over at Strobist shares a fantastic idea for photographers who would …

Here's an interesting fusion of analog camera technologies: Kevin over at the Hong Kong-based photo site FilMe figured out how to make his Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera shoot Fujifilm Instax instant photos.

Big focal length usually translates into big money. If you don't have thousands to spend on a high-quality far-reaching super-telephoto lens, the fine folks over at Screaming Tree Films came up with this 800mm Frankenlens that'll only make your wallet around $100 lighter (as opposed to thousands).

I need the ability to wirelessly take photos, but my Fujifilm X100 did not have a conventional shutter release -- it has the old fashioned ”cable” release.

After playing around and buying some cheap cable releases off eBay, I was able to build a working wireless shutter using an Arduino, servo, and a cheap wireless shutter for a Canon DSLR.

Photographs printed onto wood are hangable, durable, and sustainable. The technique I use at Wood Craft Photos involves printing the image onto a special film, preparing a wood panel with custom gel medium, and then combining, leaving the wood grain in the light colored areas of the image showing through.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how you can use this process yourself for beautiful wood prints.

Launched in 1992 and discontinued in 1996, Nikon's Nikonos RS was considered one of the best underwater photography solutions back in the 90s. The cameras and the 50mm f/2.8 macro, 28mm, 13mm fisheye, and 20-35mm lenses still sell for relatively high prices these days. Unfortunately for Nikon enthusiasts, the RS mount lenses were not compatible with F mount cameras... until now.

Underwater photographer Andrej Belic spent over a decade dreaming of using an RS lens on his Nikon DSLR, and over the past year he was able to get the combo working.

3D printing is becoming cheaper and more accessible, so photographers no longer need to rely on camera gear manufacturers for simple plastic gear items such diffusers and other light modifiers. Eric Chu over at MAKE recently noticed a photo intern using a piece of paper as a cheap flash bounce. Seeing that the makeshift bounce didn't ever last more than a few days, Chu wanted to offer a better solution... so he decided to produce one himself.

Enjoy playing around with Arduino and want to try your hand at making your own digital camera? Photographer Coralie Gourguechon has come up with a DIY digital camera called Craft Camera that consists of a simple cardboard body and Arduino guts.