DIYPhotography.net

Canon P&S shooters have CHDK, Canon film makers have Magic Lantern, and GH2 shooters have pTool. All are unofficial firmware updates, developed by the community, that provide additional features in the camera firmware.

A Nikon firmware group was started a while back, but it has seen very little progress.

Sometimes those are features developed by the dev team, like scripting, or HDR time-lapsing, but some features are simply unlocking camera capabilities that are enabled in hardware but are blocked by the firmware. Sometimes camera manufacturers develop a platform and disable certain features on specific cameras depending on marketing needs. (This is similar throughout the silicon industry and is not limited to camera, it is a way to save on R&D, tooling and manufacturing).

This is why this post over at 43rumors is a really interesting one. An anonymous hacker claims to have hacked the Olympus OM-D EM-5 claiming it is capable of features like clean HDMI output, focus peaking and 1080p@120. This is great news for Olympus shooters. Click to continue ›

Anyone who wants a camera mounted to an animal today goes for GoPro or any of the other action cams out there. We've seen actions cams with dolphins, Seagulls, and dogs.

But it turns out that shooting with an animal-tethered camera is nothing new, in fact, it has been around for over 100 years.

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This has to be one of the more creative photobooths ideas I've seen. The Zombie Detector Photobooth is just like any other booth in the sense that it takes your photograph, but unlike a regular photobooth, it will also test if you are human.

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Andy Pearson wanted to introduce some sliding motion into his Parkour time-lapse footage with Parkour Generations. He already had a Varavon slider and only needed a way to consistently and remotely move the camera on the slider. (So the drill trick ain't gonna work).

Andy took a different direction, using the output of an intervalometer to control the starting and stopping of the slider. While the video quality is not all that great, it packs a huge amount of info on building this type of motion control.

Andy was kind enough to allow us to place the video and tutorial on DIYP. If you have any questions, hit the comments. Click to continue ›

If your camera only has one extra lens, it sometimes makes sense to save on the number of bags on a trip by co-locating the lens in a laptop bag or a day bag.

The thing is, you wanna keep the lens protected. Dedicated camera bags have foam inserts, called dividers, that'll keep your lens safe from bumping against hard materials, but your laptop case will most likely won't have those dividers.

Taryn Fiol of apartment therapy came up with a smart way or protecting a lens (or a strobe for that matter) if you choose to go bag-light.

By using a beer cozy to wrap the lens Taryn was able to protect it from strap hard edges. (and won a makeshift snoot in the process).

Of course, if you want to go all the way to the other extreme, you can, with basic sewing skills, make your own camera bag insert all together.

[Creative Reuse: Keeping Camera Lenses Safe on the Cheap | Apartment Therapy] Click to continue ›

A few days ago we had a tutorial showing how to crack open and IR-ize a Cheapo $28 Canon point and shoot. Today we are upping the stakes doing a similar operation on a Pentax K10D. This installment is more of a story told by Jerry Biehler than a micro-step-by-micro-step tutorial I hope it will inspire you to try new stuff. Of course, you are still running the risk of nuking your camera, and you will definitely void the warranty (if for some weird reason you still have a warranty on your K10D), so know the risk before you get to work. Click to continue ›

While it is pretty common to use Infra Red (IR) filters for IR photography, there is yet another, braver and non-reversible way to do it - remove the IR filter that's placed in front of the CCD.

The reason for removing the internal IR filter rather than using an IR lens filter, is that you get way (WAAAY) more infra red light to hit the sensor. On the down side, you will be doing a non-reversible, non-refundable, warranty-voiding surgery on your camera. So: A - you must really love infrared photography and B - you do this at your own risk. If you kill your $28 camera don't come crying, you knew this was an option. Click to continue ›

Most of you know that I love sliders and that using a slider in a video shoot is a great way to get more value in your video production.

This next slider from pixelriffic is not the fanciest slider, but it is the kind of slider that you can build for about $20, a trip to home depot and one hour of work. It has no moving parts, and everything about it is off the shelf parts (even the felt is precut).

Definitely something to keep in mind if you get stuck without a slider in a parking lot next to a home depot and only have 1 hour till the shoot starts. Click to continue ›

In preparation for his stoners movie, The Adults, Ben Gill made a pretty simple hack to mount a camera on a car's dashboard.

This has to be one of the simpler builds I've seen, though I would not use it for anything I want to live long. It involves a peanut sponge cut to pressure-fit a camera and a rug pad to keep it from sliding of the dashboard.

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Just before I became a full time blogger, I was a firmware engineer at Texas Instruments. If you are using Comcast voice, there is a good chance you are running my team's code. (Yes, blame me for each and every dropped call)

This is why I found it super interesting that old Macintosh SE computers have secret images hidden in the ROM (read only memory) chip found on every computer. Click to continue ›