DIYPhotography.net

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 ›

Take a long hard look at the this lens. Are you familiar with it? Does it look 'right'?

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We have just over a month and a week left for our "how I took contest" and I wanted to share one of the great submissions by Evil Flip about creating a built in variable ND filter. It's a bit risky as you'll be hacking near your sensor, but the results are surprisingly good.

I took this picture by using a long exposure and since I wanted to shoot outside I needed an ND filter. I’m more of a video guy and when shooting video with a DSLR you really need an ND filter if you want control over your aperture. Since you’re stuck with a shutter speed of 1/50, shooting outdoors can force you to close your aperture and this doesn’t really give you that nice blurry filmic background. This is why professional video cameras sometimes have an ND-filer build in. And so I figured I’d try to do the same. Click to continue ›

While getting a good panoramic image got a whole lot easier with iOS6, there is still the issue of getting the phone to move the right way to achieve a perfect panorama.

Ilya Titov solved that by building a stepper based rotor motor that also controls the iPhone via the headphone socket. (kinda like Triggertrap only reversed). The bracket takes a set of 16 images to create a cylindrical panorama, but doing three sequences: Sky + Horizon + Earth can result in a full spherical panorama. Click to continue ›

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 ›