DIYPhotography.net

High Speed Photography may seem intimidating with all the high end Arduino Triggers and crazy setups that are going around.

If you just want to have a quick stub at high speed photography, your best chance is probably selecting a subject that is easy to shoot (pun intended) in the dark, and light it using a strobe. "How will the strobe know when to pop?" you ask. Easy, using a contact sensor. Such subjects include thing that you can blow up relatively slowly using an arrow or a slow moving pellet, like balloon, eggs and Christmas ornaments.

A contact sensor is one of the most primitive and easy to build high speed photography sensors and is basically build from two conductive surfaces each connected to one of the strobes contacts. When those two surfaces meet they short the circuit and pop the flash. Click to continue ›

If you thought that building a tower out of salt grains is a hard thing, think how hard it would be to photograph it in a nice way.

Photographer Alex Parker did manage to build a small tower of salt grains and take its picture.

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We don't usually share time lapse movies here on DIYP, but this one seems to innovative to ignore.

Peter Chang used an array of Canon 5D Mark IIs, camBLOCK and Dynamic Perception motion control sliders to capture both indoors and outdoors timelapse scenes in 3D. (Of course, if you have more time than money, you can always build your own).

While Peter says this is not the first attempt of a 3D motion control time-lapse it is certainly a very impressive one.

Video In 2D

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Sometimes the most amazing things happen when you leave your shutter open for a long duration. Especially if you do it in the rain, while pointing a 200 mW Laser across it.

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If you ever did any moving time lapse you know the challenges involved in making such a movie.

You would need a rail, a carriage, a precise and slow motor to drive it software to control the camera, power and a few other bits and bytes. To get an understanding of how complex such a project can be, check out the Slider project by Derek Mellott - a beautifully engineered piece of work.

There are shortcuts however :) Project OpenMoco aims at providing a full open source system for time lapse enthusiasts and indie film makers. Click to continue ›

Videographer J. P. Morgan put up another video describing how to shoot a time lapse. It is a bit different from the regular time-lapse sequences we usually see in two ways:

A - it is all done in a controlled studio environment using big guns, and B - it is moving the lights on a slider rather than moving the camera.

Adding up the cost of flashes, sliders and studio space, I arrived at about $36,864. I wonder if anyone out there knows if a similar thing has been done at a home friendly budget. Or is willing to take up the challenge.

Shooting Time Lapse with Strobes via The Slanted Lens Click to continue ›

Photographer and Videographer Stefan Kohler came up with a complete DIYed Slider system built on top of the Igus platform for bones, a stepper motor for muscles,  and an Arduino for brains (and lots of hard labor for hearts).

The slider mimics the excellent Cine Slider from Kessler, only for a fraction of the cost in money and whole lots blood sweat and tears (of joy of course). Click to continue ›

L.A. based photographer Eric Curry likes it big when it comes to light painting. Actually he likes it huge and would stop at nothing smaller than a B-25 Bomber.

Eric creates complex composites of partly lit areas of the complete picture. The amazing thing is the magnitude of objects Eric chooses to photograph.

In Eric's American Pride And Passion he light paints objects in connection with the American spirit. Luckily, Eric shares video tutorials of his work. Click to continue ›

If you love photography and you love painting, imagine how much you would love light painting.

It is called painting with light because this is what you are actually doing while taking the shot - painting with light. Aside from being darn beautiful form of photography, it is also a pretty darn cool to spend an evening or a night.

The requirements are very minimal you would need a camera that you can set on long exposure, a tripod and some light, light a flash light, matches or one of the oh-so-cool gadgets I'll share below.

If you want to get the general idea, a great place to do it is here, and if you want the jump start treatment, you can get it here.

The last thing you will need is tools, we will cover tool in a little while, but if you want to get a feel for the variety of things you can do check out this post. Click to continue ›

We've our share of Lego cameras before, but I think this is the first time DIYP features a fully automated Lego made pinhole camera.

Lego Enthusiast Bshikin build a camera from Lego parts and added quite a bit of automation using Lego Mindstorms (Lego for building machines). And the code is available via Google Code.

The Camera features include automated exposure meter, automated shutter and mechanical film advance. The Pretty nifty for a few Lego bricks.

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