As a wildlife photographer, I'm always looking for ways to capture stunning images of animals in their natural habitats. One technique I've found to be incredibly effective is using a custom-made, DIY, DSLR camera trap, which is a camera setup that is triggered by the movement of an animal.
The Mitutoyo long working distance objectives are popular in macro photography, but often difficult to mount to a camera.
This trinocular "wigglegram" lens creates vintage film-looking stereographs and is made with a combination of 3D-printed parts and scavenged disposable camera lenses.
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.
Almost anything can be used as a light modifier. As long as it interacts with light in one way or another, it can be considered a light modifier. In this article, I will show you how to build a do-it-yourself (DIY) softbox with things you likely already have around at home.
If you ever find yourself stuck indoors and in need of a fun and educational project, try building yourself a camera obscura. Here's a 7-minute video by Fotodiox showing how you can put together a small DIY one with ordinary craft store supplies.
I've got to admit that half of the reason I bought a film camera was to post cool-looking pictures on Instagram, so when I saw these things called "wigglegrams" on Instagram, I immediately wanted to make my own.
Originally, the geometric chuck was a device to make ornate patterns on a lathe. Invented in the 1860s, the device could have up to 8 layers—each driven by a central shaft.
Having a portable V-Flat in your photography kit can provide a unique tool when creating images for your clients. A V-Flat can be used as a background or a tool to bounce or absorb light on your subject.
In this article, I'm going to tell you the story of my latest camera creation: a digital Polaroid camera that combines a receipt printer with a Raspberry Pi. To build it I took an old Polaroid Minute Maker camera, stripped out its guts, and replaced the innards with a digital camera, an E Ink display, a receipt printer, and an SNES controller to operate the camera.
These days people love photo booths and once you have set it up it works -- and pays -- for itself. I found various plans and tutorials, but in my opinion, none of them had a good purchase list or a really good manual. So I decided to make my own.
Patrick Sullivan is a woodworker with over 50 years of experience under his belt. In this 15-minute video, Sullivan shares how he spent the last couple of months building a traditional large format camera -- a project that kept him "absolutely fascinated."
Despite what some people think about LIDAR for cars, in the near future it is foreseeable that this technology will take its rightful place in our daily lives. Not just for cars but with almost anything and everything. We have already seen Apple’s new iPad and iPhone utilizing this technology. I wanted to see if I could use a LIDAR, in its most fundamental function, on a film carrier that is printed on a 3D printer.
Want to shoot indoor "natural light" photos... at night? All you have to do is build yourself an artificial sun. That sounds wild, but it's actually neither too difficult nor too expensive -- this 24-minute tutorial by DIY Perks will teach you exactly how it can be done.
Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut of the Hurlbut Academy recently shared a great DIY tutorial in which he shows you how to build a giant soft box using just some foam core and a few lengths of 1x3-inch wood. The result allows you to create a large, soft light source without breaking the bank.
Waiting while flatbed scanners scan a color negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent color precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two.
The Verge Video Director Becca Farsace recently set out to build her very own custom camera by merging a point-and-shoot film camera with the new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera module and a Raspberry Pi 4 computer. Just one problem... she has zero coding knowledge. Cue a very frustrating week.
Creator Kasper from the YouTube channel MAKESOME recently set himself a challenge. After a request from his friend and photographer Mick Friis, he decided to try and create a cable cam on the cheap—basically turning an RC car into something like a Wiral LITE, or a smaller version of the Syrp slingshot.
My name is Antoine Loncle, and I'm an independent photographer. I shared my homemade 8x10 box camera on several photography groups and it received a lot of interest. I figured I'd do a little write up for anyone that wanted to know more about the camera as well as see some images of the building process.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Sony's mirrorless cameras have been known to have overheating issues, prompting Sony to release firmware fixes and photographers to come up with novel solutions such as mounted sunshades. Now one guy has created an open-source design for a Sony camera body cooler.
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’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.
Wildlife photographers sometimes set up camera traps to capture images of elusive animals. Former NASA engineer Mark Rober recently spent months creating a glitter-bomb fart-spray camera trap to capture images of elusive package thieves. As the 11-minute video above shows, the results were glorious.
In the fall of 2017, I had the opportunity to capture the transformation of an empty plot of land turning into a high-tech vehicle test track. The bulk of the construction would take place for about a year. My friend and colleague, Ryan, and I were tasked with capturing that transformation into a timelapse video.