DIYPhotography.net

We've featured a fair share of videos using shaped bokeh, but it is always about the discs that makes the shapes. We never actually taken about how to get the lights that make the bokeh thing right. And for the most of it, it's pretty simple. Just point your camera at a distant street / tree top / sparkling water / night car lights and you're good.

Well, here is something different. A clever technique for creating moving dots of lights that are not driving cars. LIGHTS's "Timing Is Everything" features a moving bokeh done by wrapping LEDs on a giant barrel like device and spinning it while shooting. Pretty clever if you ask me. (video and BTS after the jump) Click to continue ›

Here is an awesome entry to our How I Took It Contest from Mambastik. It's a vintage case for vintage looking cameras. This specific one is for the Olympus Pen EP1, but the process described makes it a breeze to adopt to any camera.

Speaking of How I Took It, the submission period is over and we are working hard an rallying up the dozens of entries and reviewing them all. Results soon.

I decided to do this build as an alternative to expensive camera cases found on various online shops. I've always asked myself, "why is it so expensive? I could probably make it myself!" And so I took on the challenge. I made this a while back, but have made improvements since then.

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Ever since Canon introduced their mirrorless EOS M I've been curious to see which of the two custom firmware groups will have a go at it: CHDK or Magic Lantern. I got my answer today.

The Magic Lantern team has successfully dumped the camera's firmware and were able ran a hello world program on it. Magic lantern writes:

In his review, Roger Cicala said the EOS-M is "a firmware update and a price drop away from being a great camera". We, the developers of ML, will try to address the first issue.

We like the EOS-M a lot, even if in our poll it came out near the bottom. With a few software tweaks, it can be a great small camera for timelapse and astronomy work, according to ubergizmo. The video side didn't really impress us, but as a compact travel camera with DSLR image quality, it's probably going to be hard to beat.

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Here is a quick and fun project submitted to our How I Took It Contest by Nick Cool. It shows how to build a soft focus filter (kinda like a lensbaby soft focus) from a small-hole sink filter.

This is what the resulting photographs will look like out of camera.

About a week ago we featured an unnamed hand crafted Laser crafted beautiful twin lens reflex with a Polaroid back.

I'll be lying if I did not admit that I would love to see a commercial version of this camera. Kevin Kodooka just released a short teaser for the upcoming kit. Maybe via Kickstarter, it definitely has the right vibe for it. (Still no name though).

That said, I doubt it would be a cheap kit. The lenses alone are usually in the range of hundreds over at eBay. Hit the jump for a video and a list of features. Click to continue ›

It was almost a year ago that Maciej Pietuszynski shared a quick and dirty tutorial on creating a tilt lens from an old Nifty-Fifty and a shower head. Surprisingly, the images were spectacular. It was a pleasure to learn that he made a fuller tutorial for our How I Took It contest.

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A quick reminder to our friends in the US. Here is your friendly reminder to change your camera clocks back from Daylight Saving Time (move back one hour). Otherwise all your pictures will be taken in the future.

(yup, I believe that this is the shortest post on DIYP ever) [via dcormier] Click to continue ›

shooting scenes through windows of moving cars is not a trivial thing. While shooting scenes through a car-window can be done with a green screen, film maker Tom Antos shows another way of doing this without getting a car in a studio. Tom builds a simple rig that can be attached to a car door, and hold a camera.

While the rig is pretty simple to build, it is kinda scary to add acting to the many tasks you face as a driver (or to add driving to the many tasks you face as an actor). Click to continue ›

About two ago Times broke with a piece about how Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has an anti-paparazzi system built on his new Yacht. This triggered a bunch of follow up posts from technology and photography blogs covering the story.

The system is described to work by detecting the CCD of an camera using lasers and shinning a bright beam of light onto the CCD rendering any image burned.

Many of the commentators were skeptic about whether or not a system like this can really exist, so we decided to take a tour to the realm of anti photography systems. Click any of the images for more info.

This home brew TLR (Twin Len Reflex) Polaroid is yet to be named (maybe you can help) but since it is a one of a kind you can just call it THE Home Brew Polaroid TLR.

Kevin Kadooka (A.K.A. kkado on flickr), a mechanical engineering student at University of Portland, created this camera by combining a lens pair from an old pair of  105mm f/3.5 lenses originally intended for a C-series Mamiya TLR with a Polaroid back from a Mamiya Universal.

Since this combination was not... hmmm.... supported by Mamiya Kevin had to design a body using solidworks and build it using birch plywood parts ordered from a laser cutting service. Click to continue ›