DIYPhotography.net

I was really interested to see how camera makers reps would respond to questions about installing custom firmware on their cameras. I approached Canon, Nikon & Panasonic customer service departments with a simple question:

Dear Canon/Nikon/Panasonic,

I would like to use Magic Lantern/Nikon Hacker / Ptool with my 5DmkII/D7000/GH2 and was wondering if it will void my warranty.

all my best,
udi

Both the short version, No, Yes, Yes and a longer more detailed one after the jump. Click to continue ›

A short while back Jen Brook wrote an open letter to photographers on behalf of models. Here is a second letter from her to her fellow models. It is actually packed with information for photographers as well.

Dear (new’ish) Model,

My name is Other Model. I have spent the last couple of years finding out a few things that I wish I’d known from the start. Please don’t think I’m patronizing as I mean this only in goodwill, as there is absolutely no gain for me by sharing these cheats. Not all of my points will be valid for you as posing varies in each genre. Just take what you can and ignore the rest. If only one suggestion helps your future career then my time has been well spent…  Click to continue ›

Nikon advertises their D3s as a war tank that can withstand some serious damage. French site pixelistes took it to the test. And when I say "took it to the test" I mean beat the living juice out of it.

Aside from using the D3s under running water, soaking it in a tub, dropping it from a car, dumping the camera in a swamp, freezing it in a block of ice and setting it on fire, they were actually pretty soft with it.

Surprisingly the camera lived to tell the tale. Albeit with some of the plastic molten. I guess this is how Nikon justifies the $6,799 price tag. (Movie after the jump, not for the faint of heart) Click to continue ›

One of the possible ways of handling unexpected and varying lighting conditions is too use a white balance lens cap to average the light temperature. Haje over at Photocritic makes a very valid point about white balance and white balance averaging lens caps.

Basically he says that if direct sun is hitting the lens cap while your subject is in the share you're reading is going to be off. Makes perfect sense to me.

Here is a typical situation Haje describes where this method will not work.

Click to continue ›

Here is a great "trick" if you want to shoot portraits on black in the outdoors. Photographer Glyn Dewis shows using a cheap brolli, a manual flash and the rules of physics to shut down ambient light and get a black background even if there is some light outside.

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While there is currently only one GIFTY camera in the world (at Jiho Jang's room), it would be completely awesome if someone took this concept and made it a reality. But right now, this fresh camera is the a one of a kind brain child of Jiho Jang as part of his college thesis.

GIFTY is a fun (or toy) camera that snaps short animated GIFs and then prints them on Zink inkless paper (kinda like the Polaroid Z2300 in-camera printer). The paper is then cut into a small flip-book that animates just like an animated Gif. Actually it is way, way cooler.

<cough, cough> anyone mentioned kickstarter..?

[GIFTY | Jiho Jang via gizmodo] Click to continue ›

A little while back we shared a nifty tutorial on making an LCD hood from a set of hotel keys. Today we are taking it up a notch with a follow up pictorial on making it a fully fledged LCD Lope Click to continue ›

Today's post by Andreas Bergmann is about communications with your subjects and making them feel good so they look good on camera.

Robyn isn’t just “a person”, she is sparkly, cheeky and silly, and it shows!

So, this turned out to take quite a while writing, and it is loooong, so get your caffeine pills ready people, today we’re talking about making people look like individuals in portraits.

A portrait is more than a topographical description of the face of a human being. It is indeed a topographical description, but it is more than that. A portrait says something about the depicted human being’s attitude, their emotions, their personality, their passion, their job, their life and it makes people who see the portrait go “That’s the person I know right there”, and people who don’t know the person feel like they know a bit more than just how the person look. Getting this into a portrait has very little to do with technical stuff, and a lot to do with personal interaction. Obviously in order to create a technically competent image, or at least to make an image look the way you want it too, you have to be technically competent. Googling for 2 seconds will give you a ton of guides to technically good portraiture, that isn’t what we’re talking about today, we’re talking about making people look like individual human beings, so get ready for fuzzy subjects, weird ideas and stuff that generally intimidate the hell out of technical introverts like myself. Click to continue ›

I guess none of you'd be surprised if we start this post by saying that location matters. In fact it is probably one of the more dominant elements of a photograph.

This is pretty much what most photographers gather after a few months of shooting. Actually, it is bigger than that, a location can make or break a photo, and if you have a "picture in your head" the further your location is from your vision, the more work (or compromises) you'll need to get to your final image.

So, why am I telling you what you already know? Because until recently (actually until I made this very photograph) I have always looked for a location that would match my vision and will need as little changes as possible to get to that final result. Click to continue ›

Canadian wedding photographer and filmmaker Zachary Rose (23) takes the common saying about pets and their owners to the next step.

Zachary shoots an photograph of a pet using a DSLR and then takes another photo holding the DSLR in a specific way so the head of the pet seems attached to the body of the pet's owner.

Zach (@zachdriftwood on Instagram) than uploads the photos to Instagram with the #petheadz hashtag.

Click to continue ›