Do It Yourself

Looking to make your own DIY overhead camera rig? Well, look no further - here is a 9-minute tutorial from photographer and YouTube star Peter McKinnon that shows you how to do just that.

A few days ago, for the first time ever in my experience with wet plate photography, I mixed up collodion from scratch. I thought I'd share about the experience.

Trying to think of a photography-related present for a photography-obsessed person in your life? Here's a 4-minute video by COOPH that features 10 great DIY gift idea for this this holiday season.

Here's a 5-minute video by photographer Bill Lawson that shares 7 different DIY gobos (go-betweens) that you can use to introduce creative shadows to your portrait photos.

There is an almost endless supply of lighting modifiers available on the market right now, some are cheap and some of the better ones are certainly a lot more expensive. But does cost directly relate to quality? Well, a lot of the time yes it does if you're referring to build quality.

Here's a 2-minute tutorial overview from Circuito that will show you how to make your own automated turntable for photography. With the ability to start, stop, and trigger the camera all by itself, this turntable is great for people looking for a streamlined product photo workflow.

Photographer Cole Rise has a deep obsession with space cameras. So deep, that he just spent over two years creating a 100% accurate replica of the first Hasselblad medium format camera used by NASA in space.

Do you enjoy making your own lighting gear instead of spending hefty fees for commercial products? Here's a 10-minute tutorial by photography instructor Joe Edelman on how to build and use your own strip light modifier for under $25.

In this 5-minute video from The Slanted Lens, learn how to create a window in a seamless and add beautiful shafts of light into your studio shots.

Danish designer Milan Madge recently built himself a gigantic Leica III rangefinder camera out of LEGO blocks. The level of detail is impressive.

Daniel DeArco has created what he claims to be the "world's fastest camera slider." Capable of sliding 5 feet in just 0.15 seconds, this thing is pretty darn fast - check out what it can do in the 3-minute demo above.

Albertino of Instax Magic created a unique camera that blends the old and the new. Half of it is made of LEGO, and half is a 90-year-old Zeiss-Ikon Trona folding plate camera.

If you're into photography, chances are that you've seen the tutorials where you are supposed to cut hearts out of paper to get heart-shaped bokeh. I recently decided to try to do this myself. But I soon realized that my scissor skills aren't anywhere near good enough to make nice looking heart shapes... let alone anything more advanced.

Last year, I bought a macro lens for the summer. Just a normal one with 1x magnification. I fell into a beautiful and mesmerizing world of minuscule flowers and bugs. I found that in macro photography, you don't have to travel to beautiful places to take beautiful photos -- you can just walk around in your backyard, and discover a whole new world.

Need to take portraits and don’t have access to a lighting kit? No worries – this 4-minute video from Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens will show you how you can turn a bathroom – or any room for that matter – into a softbox to create beautiful soft light.

Instagif is a new camera that's what you would get if you crossed a Polaroid instant camera with those moving pictures from the Harry Potter universe. The brainchild of Abhishek Singh, the camera captures a GIF and instantly "prints" it out on a little cartridge.

This short 2-minute video from photographer Svitlana Vronska demonstrates some clever lighting tricks you can use to add some creative flair to your images with an otherwise uninteresting backdrop.

Nearly every professional studio I’ve ever used has these "polyboards" and you‘ve probably even seen them yourself but may not have known what they’re used for. Polyboards are polystyrene boards that usually measure 4 feet wide by 8 feet high and are normally 2 inches thick. One of the other defining characteristics is that they are often white on one side and black on the other.

There are plenty of tutorials on the web for how to create DIY ring lights, but this build has a unique take. The 10-minute video by Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter will take you through the steps required to build a triangular “ring” LED light that can be dimmed.

With the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017, only weeks away, I decided to put together some solar filters. With the high travel costs to get to the eclipse from Southern California, I saved some money through purchasing solar filter sheets instead of the pre-made filters.

Bored of the standard camera strap that came with your camera? In this 37-minute video by Nick Exposed, learn how to upcycle old leather belts into stylish camera straps.

Here’s a quick DIY video from Kyle Martin on how to create an extremely powerful suction mount for your GoPro instead of buying GoPro's $40 suction mount. The video is 6 minutes and will show you how to create the mount for around $20 in materials.

Photographer Joey Ready wanted to take his Super 8 film camera into the water to snap some clips of surfers. There aren't any underwater housings designed for his old Canon camera, so he fashioned his own. The video above is what resulted.

I'm as interested in an "easy life" as much as the next person, so if somebody else has already done the hard work of making a product for me, and I can purchase it for a reasonable price, I'm all over it. After all why make life hard for yourself if you don't have too. Unfortunately there are times when you literally can't purchase what you need and the only option is to get all arts-and-crafts on the problem!

Beauty dishes are great pieces of equipment to have in your lighting arsenal, but they come at a price. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a dish, yet using a cheap shoot-through umbrella can easily produce the same effect, as this 10-minute tutorial by Joe Edelman shows.

"Camera obscura" refers to a device for viewing an image that makes use of the principles of pinhole imagery, and is usually made with a box of sorts. It's this that was eventually turned into the first pinhole camera - and now you can make your own!

Some cameras are more prone to overheating than others, leading some photographers and videographers to come up with creative solutions for keeping their sensors cool. Industrial designer Eric Strebel came up with a solution that looks pretty unusual: he customized a computer heat sink so that it can be mounted to the back of a Panasonic GF7.

Here's a neat idea for light painting photos: if you build a custom light tube using a certain type of reflective metallic material, your photos will look like they're filled with rainbows.

Adam Savage, one of the guys you'll recognize from MythBusters, recently had a friend come to him in need bearing a $1,800 lens with a filter stuck tightly to the threads.

Action shots of cars in movement are often taken with a ‘car rig’ – basically a long pole that is attached to the car, with a camera mounted on the end. A professional car rig can cost in the thousands, but this 13 minute video from Practical Photography will teach you to make your own for under $40.

Mounting a monitor on your DSLR usually means using an articulating ball mount, which is fiddly and impossible to adjust with one hand. Caleb Pike shows how to build a freely adjustable mount using GoPro parts in this 5 minute video.

Have you ever found yourself sitting and watching someone browsing through their travel snaps, flitting between endless folders on their computer? No one likes looking at someone else's holiday snaps, but Caroline Buttet wants to change that with her interactive globe project.

After the highly anticipated Sony a9 began landing in the hands of photographers, there were some reports of the camera displaying its overheating indicator icon after short periods of use in ordinary environments. Israeli photographer Senya Alman came up with a clever way of keeping his own Sony camera cool: he built it a little hot shoe cover for portable shade.

There is an extremely talented landscape photographer called Thomas Heaton whose YouTube videos I find very instructive and entertaining. Recently he featured a new product he was sent to try out: the Loupedeck, a physical console that lets you control Lightroom (the main software I use to sort, catalog and edit my photographs).

In this creative 2-minute tutorial, Ukranian photographer Anya Anti demonstrates how to make an interesting bokeh effect using shapes cut out of a paper backdrop.

The idea of cleaning the sensor on your camera is a frightening prospect for many photographers, but it needn’t be. This 2-minute video will show you how to shake that fear and banish dust, dirt, and oil from your sensor’s filter glass for good.

Ready to get creative this weekend? Good, because our friends at COOPH are back with 9 creative photography tricks you can try out at home when you have a spare minute. From making your own glitter "snow," to magnifying glass macro and beyond, there are some really fun tips in here.

Macro photography can be incredibly expensive, but as British photographer Adam Kappa shows in this video, it doesn't have to be. In 7 minutes, Kappa demonstrates how to produce impressive macro shots using kit lenses, extension tubes, and a flash diffuser crafted from a Chinese takeout container.

In this short-but-useful tutorial from DSLR Video Shooter, Caleb Pike runs you through 5 video and photography uses for simple foam board. Get out a pen and a pad, this photo DIY 101.

In this 8-minute video by Macroscope Pictures, learn how to build a color changing wand light with your own two hands for only $30 in materials. For an extra 15 bucks, you can add a Wi-Fi controller and control the finished product with your phone.