DIYPhotography.net

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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If you had a chance to shoot one of America great modern wonders, the Saturn V Rocket, what camera would you use. I mean, that is some respected rocket, being the one that landed me on the moon.

Our pal Destin (whom you may recall as the guy who shoots matches) met with Darren Samuelson, the maker of the Great Big Camera, at the US Space and Rocket Center to shoot the Saturn V with one of the biggest cameras I know.

The camera weighs about 70 pounds and takes in film sheets which are 504 sq inch big. This much films should allow it to photograph a huge amount of details.

The last thing that got my attention was the amount of time spent on measurements, with today's digital meters, metering is becoming more rare, but I guess that if you are going to expose 504 sq inches, develop and then print it, you wanna make sure you are on the dot.

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We have shown screen doing 3D extrusion before using both iPads and iPhones, but this is the first time we are featuring a tutorial that uses a 30" monitor.

Photographer Zeke Adam (Flickr) agreed to share the secrets behind his non-existing man series, which basically light paints a non existing man. Duh... While Zeke uses high end software like 3D Studio Max and Cinema 4D, similar results can be achieved with free software (like Blender, which we featured before). Some of the steps are too complex to include in this tutorial, but we will refer you to the relevant places to learn or download shortcuts.

It's all Zeke from now. Click to continue ›

They say that if you set a 1,000,000 monkeys at 1,000,000 typewriters for 1,000,000 years and let them type randomly at the machines, one of those monkeys will end up accidentally writing the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Similarly, I wonder, if we sat down 1,000,000 monkeys with a ton of LEGO bricks, will they end up building a fully functional camera.

Well, photographer Cary Norton took the monkey part out of the equation and proved that a fully functional camera can indeed be built from heap loads of LEGO bricks

The camera, named Legotron,  uses a 4x5 film back and took over a year (with lapses) to build. Images are quite impressive. Click to continue ›