Do It Yourself

A team of photographers built a super fast f/0.3 29mm lens from a Leitz projector lens to shoot a beautiful short film.

Since the advancements made with mirrorless camera systems and their digital viewfinders, cameras with optical viewfinders have become somewhat rare, with hybrid viewfinders being even harder to find. This is why Getschmann decided to dive into his physics and engineering background to build one from scratch for his smartphone camera.

A photographer has renovated his 100-year-old 8x10 large format film camera after its original bellows began leaking light.

A photographer built his own wildlife pond with an adjacent photo hide so he could capture beautiful photos of flora and fauna.

Photographer and computer science undergrad student Joshua Bird has created a 3D-printed movie camera that uses "normal" photo film canisters, with the goal of letting him enjoy the nostalgic look of film video without paying for expensive motion picture film.

A 3D-printable adapter allows fans of the Game Boy Camera to use small CS-mount interchangeable lenses with it, which also opens the door to adapting much larger optics to the camera first made available in 1998.

A Redditor's 3D-printable pistol grip for cameras takes the phrase "point and shoot" and makes it a lot more literal.

A team of designers has created what it calls the Photon: a small, simple, light meter that is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico and costs a fraction of what most camera accessory companies charge for one.

A photographer came up with a novel way of protecting his lens when using a remote camera to capture rocket launches.

For those with family members who grew up in the 1980s (or earlier), a slide projector was a pretty common way to share and show images before the internet was a thing. But these days, finding a way to get people to sit and view these images in a dark room with you is even harder than finding a functional projector. To covert his old 35mm slides to digital, photographer Scott Lawrence built a custom digitizing system based on a slide projector.

This trinocular "wigglegram" lens creates vintage film-looking stereographs and is made with a combination of 3D-printed parts and scavenged disposable camera lenses.

The KineCAM is an instant camera-inspired "DIY" device that allows users to capture and create "animated" photographs (of physical GIFs) in the form of a kinegram.

As creatives are tasked with greater and greater volumes of work, accessories to help speed up their workflow become more and more valuable. While editing consoles can be incredibly useful, they can also be incredibly expensive, which is why YouTuber "Pedro" of DSLR DIY CNC has shared how you can build your own custom "InfiniteDeck" for just about $50.

A YouTuber has created "the worst digital camera of all time ever" consisting of just 48 photocells soldered to a circuit board.

Have you ever had a repeated inconvenience that finally makes you say to yourself, "Okay, I’m done with this garbage"? Well, that’s the exact feeling I had with using contrast filters on my enlarger. Anytime I wanted to use a contrast filter, I needed to use tape to hold it in place while I was printing.

A woman created an artificially intelligent (AI) infrared camera rig using a Rasberry Pi to monitor her cat's poop after she discovered it was eating plastic.

Apple's foray into digital cameras was short-lived but one photographer is still using his, only with a Nikon F-Mount placed on the 1995 camera.

Photographer Nicholas Sherlock 3D printed a $25 super wide-angle macro lens using glass from a CCTV camera and a 4x microscope.

A computer science student with a passion for electronics and photography has created a 3D printed 12-megapixel camera powered by Linux and a Raspberry Pi computer system named the PiCam.

Photographer Felix Steele has created a design for a 3D-printed 164mm f/2.5 lens that has no fasteners or screws, uses affordable glass elements, and can be built at home for less than $15.

Photographer and lens enthusiast Mathieu Stern has attached a disposable camera lens to a Sony Alpha A7 II to recreate the 1990s look.

A filmmaker has built a home-made motorized camera rig out of the recycled parts from an aging 3D printer.

A photographer has used his 3D printer to create an impressive 900mm reflector telescope that is so simple to put together that "it’s like assembling furniture from IKEA."

I’ve used poly-boards, bounce-boards, and even white sheets and white walls as lighting modifiers to soften the light in the past, but arguably the quickest and most efficient way to instantly achieve beautifully soft light, is the V-Flat.

Game Boy and camera enthusiast, Christopher Graves, fused his two passions to create the Game Boy Camera M, a mirrorless Game Boy camera with a sleek design.

The world's first 4K camera built into a centrifuge shows what foods and other substances look like as they are separated at 2,500 times the gravity of Earth.

DIY-er Sean Billups has transformed his old Google Pixel 3A into a multispectral camera that can view in Ultraviolet (UV) and Infrared (IR) wavelengths that are not normally visible to the human eye.

A photographer 3D printed a 4x telescopic macro adapter lens and sent it to a photographer for a field test who produced stunning results with the custom-made glass.

Electronics engineer Guarav Singh has 3D-printed a camera chassis that's designed to work with interchangeable lenses and sensors.

I do a fair bit of macro photography in the studio, for both scientific and artistic purposes. I’ve used tripods, boom poles, and large copy stands to get the camera in close. The setups were often complicated, and I sometimes felt I was concentrating more on the gear than the photograph.

An industrious photographer 3D-printed replacement parts for his broken Olympus E-M1 after the camera froze in negative four-degrees Fahrenheit conditions while snowboarding.

A photographer has repurposed an old and broken Sony Ericsson smartphone lens into a camera that shoots film and integrated it into his Samsung Galaxy S2.

Photographer Corrine Gretton-West booked a wet plate workshop with me before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Two years later we were finally able to do it.

Scrap metal artist and ASE-certified technician Christopher Bissett has built a camera out of scrap metal that features a "working" flash and shutter button.

ArduCam has developed a new 64-megapixel, high-resolution camera that works with the Raspberry Pi, giving DIY camera builders a lot more creative flexibility.

Are you sometimes annoyed by having too many easy and convenient ways to take perfect photos? Don’t despair…

There is no denying that shooting on film is expensive. It is among the many reasons major studios have all shifted to using digital cameras for their movie-making. But even with the shift in technology and cost, there is just something appealing about the way these old analog cameras work. This is why engineer and designer Yuta Ikeya decided to make his own analog movie camera with 3D printing.

Like many photo and video creatives, the team at Syrp Lab has a lot equipment that takes up an obscene amount of space. In this seven-minute video, the team shows how it turned a dark and cluttered room into something organized, functional, and fashionable.

My name is David Windestal, and in this video and article, I will share how you can hack and modify a Game Boy Camera to mount serious camera lenses in order to shoot amazing lo-fi photos.

I occasionally like to do some light painting with strobes. To make that easier, I ripped off the legs of an old light stand so that it is just a handheld pole with a light. I also wanted to be able to control my camera with a remote when holding the light so that I can operate my camera on a tripod and do everything without an assistant.

Photographer Ronaldo Carvalho took an old and broken fixed-lens Olympus film camera lens and adapted it to work on a new Canon EOS R6, breathing new life into retired gear.

I purchased some of the new compact and foldable Godox softboxes (e.g. AD-S60S, AD-S65W, AD-S85S, etc) for my Godox AD300 Pros. They work just fine but I wanted to use the magnetic color gels from my AK-R1 kit with them, so I decided to design my own gel holder compatible with the AD300 Pro.

For the last 50 years, we’ve all had to live with the Hasselblad Super Wide C's flaws, its shortcomings, its chunky "industrial chic" looks and function. Like most everyone else, I’ve had the same thoughts and visceral reaction when it came to this particular camera.

A cheap adapter from Sintech allows industrious photographers to take inexpensive SSDs and build their own CFexpress memory cards at home, allowing them to possibly save hundreds of dollars over "official" cards.

Jason De Freitas is a guy who is passionate about both film photography and flying drones, and recently he combined those two loves in a brilliant way: he built an analog-camera drone and shot aerial landscape photos on 35mm slide film.

Battery technology has provided a plethora of ways to take power away from traditional wall outlets, including relatively small packs that can power photography lights. A man in China took that idea to the extreme by building a colossal 27,000,000mAh "portable" power bank.