Do It Yourself

It’s called Bertha, and it will be the protagonist of the largest slide ever made. A gigantic camera born out of a desire to find out what photography can reveal when it's pushed beyond certain limits.

Self-described "maker" and YouTuber Sean Hodgins of Idle Hands Development recently took on a DIY project that's way beyond most of us mere mortals: he built his very own, working, 1-Kilopixel image sensor. Take that Sony!

My name is Ethan Moses, I make cameras at CAMERADACTYL. I 3D print film cameras and ship them all over the world. I want to share the newest camera I’ve made: the CAMERADACTYL Brancopan, a 35mm wide format camera that makes 20x 24x58mm frames in a 1:2.4 aspect ratio on standard 36 exposure 35mm film.

Did you know that you can make your own ground glass focusing screen? In his latest video, wet plate photographer Markus Hofstätter shows you exactly how by making a ground glass screen for one of his large format cameras.

Daniel Riley of the popular YouTube channel rctestflight has been building tiny autonomous boats, and recently he realized that the platform would be perfect for shooting photos for hyperlapse videos. In this 14-minute video, he explains how he made and tuned a boat for automated hyperlapses.

After getting his hands on two broken Lubitel twin-lens reflex cameras, Iranian photographer Alireza Rostami found that the shutter mechanisms still worked, so he decided to turn parts from the two cameras into a homemade dual-lens wrist camera for 3D stereoscopic photography.

For my latest project, "we are the dead," I decided to build a room in which to shoot my pictures. I had absolutely no idea how to do this, but there were some facts I needed to consider.

What started off as a quick lighting test in my garage has turned into a full investigation and installation of my own DIY photography ceiling rail system. My shooting space measures 7x10 feet (2x3m) -- not a great space for shooting portraits.

Last year, I used a custom-built setup to shoot a timelapse of an eternal terrarium in my kitchen. Over the course of 10 months, a camera took two photos every hour of the day, while the plants inside the terrarium grew on their own without disturbance.

There are any number of ways to trigger a digital camera remotely: from IR remotes to smartphone apps. But if you're a bit more old fashioned, then Instructables user Steloherd has hacked together something you might like even better.

Photographer Nicholas Sherlock is back at it with his 3D printed creations. After creating a huge 5x macro setup using a 3D printed 300mm extension tube earlier this year, he decided to design and build a special 'rifle-style grip' that would allow him to more easily use that monstrous rig.

Want a tabletop wooden backdrop you can use for photographing everything from products to babies? Here's a 10.5-minute video by Erik Tande of DIY done wrong showing how you can make your own for basically zero cost.

Recently I made my own custom-built camera rig for shooting Through-The-Viewfinder videos on a Nikon Z6 through the viewfinder of an old Lomo Lubitel 166. With my setup, I can have the whole camera in the frame but without distracting hands visible. Here's how I did it.

Photographer Isaac Alvarez of Unplug Productions is at it again in a video that shows you how to capture striking, professional-grade "ink-watch" photography in your own living room using only the most basic equipment.

Light macro photographs can be tricky. If you are a beginning macro photographer and do not know where to start when it comes to using a speedlight to illuminate your subjects, here is a complete guide to different flash diffusers you can use for macro photos.

I have had this shot in my mind for years now. Seagulls, lots of seagulls, mobbing a camera. Wide-angle fisheye perspective. Reminiscent of Hitchcock.

If you develop your own film or wet plates, photographer Markus Hofstaetter has a great tip for you. With just a tiny little DIY tweak, you can turn a $5 all-in-one IKEA gadget into the perfect all-in-one Darkroom timer, thermometer and clock.

Photographer and creative tinkerer Alireza Rostami is back at it. After turning a broken computer into a working camera in August, he embarked on a new DIY project: making a working flash that you can wear like a wristwatch.

We've seen some unusual camera modding projects before, but this one is next level. Someone over in China took a $2,500 Sony a7R III, took it apart, and, through an insane amount of work, turned it into a $5,000 Leica Q2.

Want to set up a remote DSLR for shooting a time-lapse? The Intervalometerator (AKA 'intvlm8r') is an open-source intervalometer that can help you do so at minimal hardware cost (as long as you're comfortable tinkering with hardware and software).

For those of us born in the 1970s and 80s, this new phenomenon of mottled, cloudy backdrops appearing in modern portraits is an odd one. You see, back when we were kids, we had horrendously cheesy family and school portraits taken in front of these bizarrely arranged patterns, so to us, it’s pretty weird to see these painted, cloudy backdrops now grace the covers of Vogue and Tatler.

I've been involved with The Wild West Days in Viroqua, Wisconsin since 2008. I've been doing photography for most of that time as well, but as-of 2017, officially as Hickok Country Photography.

Camera-making enthusiast Lucus Landers has created the Mini View Camera, a creation he believes is the smallest view camera (and one of the smallest film cameras) ever made.

I wanted to see if it was possible to turn a dead SX-70 camera into a functioning digital camera without significantly modifying it’s outward appearance. I had no idea if this was reasonably doable but I set out to give it a try.

Edelkrone's Flextilt Head 2 is its best-selling tripod head. If you can't afford the $149 it costs to get one, the company has just unveiled the Flextilt Head 3D, a cheaper option you can 3D print and assemble yourself.

Brendan Barry is a UK-based large format photographer who has a curious passion for creating working cameras out of the most random everyday objects you could think of. ILFORD featured his work earlier this year, and here's a look at some of his cameras and the photos they shoot.

I recently collaborated with Chris from filmismorefun and made a video about how to clean the beam splitter in your rangefinder camera as well as how to improve the rangefinder patch too. This is an advanced tutorial with great results.

I'm Niklas Roy, and I recently built a kilopixel camera called The Flying Pixel Portrait Camera. It's a do-it-yourself project that uses a single photoresistor and a video projector in order to capture portraits.

PrismLensFX unveiled a set of Variable Prism Filters back in March that lets photographers achieve prism effects using specially-designed lens filters. Upon seeing the prism filters, landscape photographer Christian Mögnum Möhrle decided to try his hand at making his own do-it-yourself version.

Every year, a pine tree close to our house produces the most perfect cones, and I often pick up a handful of them on my way home. The cones are undeniably beautiful, but not of much practical use. Or so I thought, until one day it hit me that a cone would make a rather nifty SD card holder.

In this article, I'm going to show you how you can make a DIY darkroom safelight using very simple products from IKEA. Yes, IKEA the store that sells furniture that's almost made of cardboard.

Self-taught programmer Martin Fitzpatrick of Two Bit Arcade has created the world's first Etch A Sketch digital camera. It captures digital photos and then outputs them by drawing them onto the Pocket Etch A Sketch "screen" found on the back.

Ben Ouaniche of the YouTube channel Macro Room spent the past many months working on a high-speed spinning camera rig project. The result is a rig that can capture incredible slow-motion action footage while spinning around a tabletop set at 150 rotations per minute.

I recently converted my friend's Durst Laborator 1200 enlarger to use LED lights. In this article I'll share how I did it.

For Easter, I made a pinhole camera out of a chocolate Easter egg. In this 5-minute video and article, I'll show you how it's done.

Want a camera stabilizer that's sure to attract (perhaps unwanted) attention? Just add a rifle-style stock to it. Alex over at I did a thing made this humorous 5-minute video showing how he built such a stabilizer for his own DSLR.

Can an ordinary person made a camera lens from scratch? Here's a 22-minute video in which Andy George of How To Make Everything answers that question by producing clear glass and metal and combining them to create a camera lens.

I was often disappointed by my Canon 5D Mark II not having a flipping or better yet a detachable monitor. Instances of this happened when I placed the camera on a fully extended tripod and had the camera pointed downwards to make a photograph of something on the floor. Getting one’s eye above the view screen was sometimes impossible.

Photography. It’s expensive. And who really has the money to buy all the name brand photo gear? I certainly don’t. With that said, expensive equipment does NOT make the photograph -- the photographer does, which is why I am exploring various non-photography-specific gear and using it for my photography.

I have been looking into shooting other sports outside of the motorsport world, and I have been particularly interested in soccer, basketball, and baseball. After doing some research, I found that some sports shooters covering these type of events use different remote trigger setups such as foot pedals and cable release buttons.

I got my first 3D printer recently, but it sits in a dark corner of my room, so I thought I'd design a light for it. Then I realized I could kill two birds with one stone and design it to be useful for photography as well.

I’ve written about this project in the past, as I originally made the rain machine and shot with it in 2012, but we’ve now done it in video form! Hopefully it shows a little more detail about the construction and how I shot with it.

It’s not often I get to shoot very simple, clean white light shots, but in a recent shoot the model asked if she could get some updated ‘Polaroids’. For those of you not familiar with the term when used in reference to a model shoot, it’s actually not the now-obsolete and ludicrously expensive single-shot film, but a request for very basic portraits of the model for their agency.

Iranian photographer Alireza Rostami loves experimenting with camera equipment, from flipping a lens element for "magic bokeh" to creating a working analog watch camera. His latest experiment is also off the beaten path: he found that a display from a broken laptop works perfectly as a view camera's ground glass.