Want a portable and powerful LED light for illuminating your shots? The "Sun-Blaster" is a 1000 watt equivalent LED flashlight that you can build yourself for around $40.
This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.
Moscow-based artist Dmitry Morozov has created a strange DIY camera unlike any we've seen before. It's an 8-bit instant photo shooter created with an old Game Boy, a camera, a thermal printer, an Arduino board, and a gun.
Raspberry Pi project platform PiJuice is currently raising funds for its portable module on Kickstarter. As a demo of its capabilities, the team has created a step-by-step tutorial showing how the product can be used to build a DIY Raspberry Pi compact digital camera.
Here's an idea for a fun weekend project and/or personalized gift: make some custom candles that feature your photographs. It's actually incredibly easy, and you may already have the necessary materials lying around at home.
As a photographer, I’m constantly striving for new ways to stand out. While considering that some of the greatest opportunities to create a lasting impression on a potential client in my realm (motorcycle and automotive photography) are at trade shows, or highly publicized events, sometimes all you have is one shot.
But how do I set myself apart from the hundreds of other hobbyists walking the showroom floor with a DSLR, a Facebook fan page and a business card itching for work?
Photography enthusiasts Diego Veríssimo and Ana Magalhães (seen in the portrait above) recently shot a series of portraits using a gigantic camera they built using a room and about $10 in materials.
If you'd like to use legacy Nikkor lenses on your modern Nikon camera, one thing you can do to improve functionality is add a CPU to them. While there are services out there that can convert your lenses for a fee, you can also buy the programmable component for $30 on eBay and do it yourself.
That's what photographer Kalafok Vlakostnitsj recently did with his Nikon AI-S 300mm f/2.8 lens.
Starting back in May of 2014, I finally put my first foot forward in the making of a 16x20 inch bellows camera. The idea to build a camera was nothing new to me, but I was always hesitant to begin construction since I am the type of person that prefers to work off a set of blue prints and directions. Unfortunately, since my drawing skills aren't amazing, it was pretty difficult to visualize and plan a solid blueprint of the project - which ultimately forced me to bite the bullet and simply begin construction of the camera and problem solve along the way.
The Kodak Brownie line of affordable cameras was first introduced in 1900 and cost $1, bringing photography to the masses and pioneering snapshot photography. Mexican photographer Raymundo Panduro of Tlaquepaque, Jalisco wanted to pay tribute to this iconic camera, so he spent two weeks (in his free time) building a homemade pinhole camera based on a Brownie Hawkeye that he had purchased at a flea market.
I recently made myself a DIY Spider Light as a thrifty alternative to the Spiderlite that costs hundreds of dollars. The entire project ended up costing $40 per light and can be built entirely with parts from a local home improvement store.
It turned out pretty well I think, with the added benefit of being bulletproof -- you can stand on the body without breaking it.
For years I’ve struggled with my workspace, I’ve had loads of different ones, from small ones in the corner of the living room in my old apartment to ones that take up my entire 3 metre wide office in my current house, they have all had their merits but most frustratingly I have never truly liked working at any of them. They’ve all had massive issues that have made working at them difficult and as a result they are hardly the most inspiring way to work in the office.
One of the most important decisions a photographer can make is picking a camera, and with all the different kinds out there, everyone has options. You can look up reviews, talk shop with colleagues, and take your time in the very subjective process of picking out the best camera for yourself and your needs.
But what about building the best camera for yourself?
How cheap and minimalist can you make a DSLR intervalometer? A camera hacker who goes by Glitchmaker recently wanted to find out, and the SHTTTRRR is the result of his experiment. It's a small low-power device that uses only an on/off switch and a button for setting the interval.
The Ice Light is "a portable, dimmable, daylight balanced, continuous LED light source with a built in battery" that costs $450. In this post I will show you how I made a DIY version for less than $30.
Photographer Pascal Kulcsar of Mainz, Germany wanted to add some movements to his time-lapse videos, so he built himself a fancy dolly using LEGO pieces. The tiny vehicle has 6 wheels and is powered by a motor that can run for 8 hours of constant movement with regular AA batteries.
The digital camera industry is dominated by eye-level viewfinders, but waist-level finders have their advantages. One main one is that it makes photographing strangers less threatening since the photographer is looking down instead of directly at the subjects.
Looking for a simple weekend project that lets you experiment with photography? Makify created this 4-minute step-by-step tutorial on how you can create a DIY extension tube using some plastic piping to capture macro photos using your regular lens.
The shutter on my old Canon 5D Mark II died while on a trip to Fiji earlier this year. It happened quickly; I was shooting a panorama when horizontal black bars started appearing in some of the shots. After about 10 more photos in between turning the camera off and on again, it was dead. The shutter was stuck closed and powering the camera on yielded a helpless sounding soft ‘clunk’ and an “Error 20″ message.
I was quoted around $500 to get this fixed at a repair shop. But.. an OEM replacement shutter is only $90 on eBay. So, after about 6 months of putting it off I finally built up enough #YOLO fever to have a crack at fixing it myself, saving $400 and learning a few things along the way.
One of photographer Jeff Paradiso's big projects this past year was to create a sideways room for "anti-gravity" photos. These are images in which the viewer is disoriented in regards to which way is up.
Photographer Dario Morelli is a computer aided designer and programmer by trade. Several years ago, during a period of unemployment, he began diving deeply into the world of custom-made scanner cameras. There's an entire niche of photographers who are interested in the idea of turning flatbed scanners into digital cameras.
What you see is the result of one of Morelli's experiments. It's a medium format camera created by stuffing parts from an Epson scanner into a custom enclosure.
How do you build a quality DIY camera slider on the cheap? Who better to ask than the founder …
Want a simple battery-powered time-lapse camera that you can leave in locations for up to a year? A hacker who goes by "val3tra" is trying to build one. The goal of his project is a camera that can continuously photograph a scene for months or years on time while powered only by a handful of ordinary batteries.
Did you know that the Statue of Liberty started out as a dull copper color, but turned green over time due to oxidation occurring on the copper skin? The green patina (also called verdigris) can occur naturally or with human intervention on copper, brass, and bronze.
Know what else is brass? The body of the Leica M2 underneath the chrome surface. Photographer Bellamy Hunt used this fact to create a custom DIY special edition of the M2, the "Patina Edition."
Here's an interesting weekend photography project of moderate technical difficulty: the video above is a tutorial on how you can make a DIY coffee cup spy camera. The camera sees out of the cup's base and has a shutter that's triggered whenever you lift the cup and pretend to drink from it.
Want a camera that can automatically encrypt photos after taking them? A hacker named Doug did. After having this idea for years without seeing camera companies offer it, he decided to take matters into his own hands and make it happen himself.
What resulted is a new custom firmware for the Samsung NX300 that adds photo encryption to the camera.
Want to make a photography gift this holiday season instead of buying one? The video above offers 6 fun ideas for easy DIY photo gifts you can try your hand at. Each product is a different way to share your photography with someone.
The "Special Moments" camera is a cheap plastic 35mm camera that you can pick up at certain dollar stores for just a buck.
Photography enthusiast Daniel Goodale-Porter wanted to make his even more "special," so he set out to see how much he could improve the design and functionality of the camera, DIY-style.
Here's a clever idea we've never seen before: a card that "loads" as you open it. Pull the card out of the sleeve and watch as the progress bar magically "works."
Christopher Mitchell recently breathed some photographic life into a pice of technology many of us probably have languishing away in some drawer. With the help of an Arduino board, he’s found a way to Frankenstein a Texas Instruments graphing calculator and Game Boy Camera into the ArTICam: a 128–128 grayscale selfie machine.