Techniques

Light Painting Primer (In French With Subtitles)

French photographer Wen-Jié Yangjust is pretty talented when it comes to light painting.

Light Painting Primer (In French With Subtitles)

The good news is that he had just released an awesome light painting tutorial, covering the basics, intermediate and a bit of the more advanced stuff.

Bad news is that the video is in French (unless you speak French, of course).

Good news again, we asked him to translate it and he agreed, so subtitles are included. Click to continue ›

How To Convert A Time-lapse Intervalometer To A Slider Controller

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).

How To Convert A Time-lapse Intervalometer To A Timelapse Controller

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 ›

Capturing Colored Salt Thrown By Speaker Sound

Photographer Fabian Oefner creates amazing sculptures of pigment colored salt by placing it on a thin plastic foil stretched on a speaker. He calls them Dancing Colors.

The shutter is opened for a few seconds in a darkened room, and once the speaker starts vibrating the pigmented salt rises to the air, a microphone picks up the noise and triggers the flashes. This is a pretty typical setup for high speed photography. Low power is used for capturing sharp images, 4 strobes are used as key and another 2 as fill.

Capturing Colored Salt Thrown By Speaker Sound

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How To Shoot A Water Splash With A Spectacular Bokeh

I am always keeping a close eye on Corrie White's work. She seems to always have a new trick up her sleeve.

How To Shoot A Water Splash With A Spectacular Bokeh

A few days ago I saw Corrie White's amazing splash with bokeh photograph and was drawn to it. I asked Corrie how she took the image and she was kind enough to walk DIYP readers through it. If you want the more basic stuff, visit Corrie's Comprehensive Water Drop Photography Guide Click to continue ›

You CAN Build Everything With Lego, Even A Pinhole Camera

Photographer Giacomo Citti built an interesting camera made entirely of Lego bricks. (yes, we are on a pinhole roll here)

The only exceptions are a little bit of black electrical tape and black painted foil for prevent light leak.

panoramic pinhole lego

Giacomo uses Ilford PanF film, 50 iso which he exposes for about 1 - 5 seconds depending the lighting conditions. The reason for this specific Ilford PanF film is that it compensate very well for minor exposure errors. The size of the exposed film is about 24X80 mm. kinda usual, but gives wonderful panoramic results.

Giacomo says that the camera was inspired by Found Photography's Lego cameras archive. Having looked at it, this archive is an incredible resource if you are looking to make a Lego pinhole for yourself. More images and results after the jump. Click to continue ›

Kite Aerial Photography 101

In this post I will show you how to build a quick and easy rig to get your camera flying (without any magic wands and jumping from nukem driven airplanes).

Kite Aerial Photography 101

Yes, welcome to another boring tutorial... wait I say boring loud? Is not, it is fun, relaxing and sometimes adrenalin twisted outdoor exercise - welcome to Kite Aerial Photography 101.

Lets get started Click to continue ›

How To Make A Pinhole Camera From A Film Box

Over the years we posted quite a collection of pin hole how-to's, making pinholes from cardboard, calendars, LEGO, heck even toilet paper tube. But we never actually took the obvious path of making a pinhole camera from a box of film. I mean anybody who builds a pinhole has a box of film, right? Lomography's enthusiast sidsel shares his film box into pinhole camera recycling tutorial.

How To Make A Pinhole Camera From A Film Box

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Wonderfully Constructed Dirkon Pinhole Camera

The DIRKON pinhole camera is a paper craft pinhole camera made entirely from paper. The camera was developed by a Czech magazine called "An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists" in 1979.

Wonderfully Constructed Dirkon Pinhole Camera

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How To DIY An Uber High Speed Trigger

Michael Ross is not only a talented photographer, he is also somewhat of a maker. If you don't believe me check his Digital Light Wand and Programmable Orb Tool tutorials. His latest endeavor is a super functional Arduino based high speed trigger.

Screwed Up!

I did not play with the kit, but it seems that it is one of the most well thought and function rich triggers out there. Click to continue ›

Markus Reugels Makes Amazing Waterdrops Captures

Spiderman

Markus Reugels, a German photographer creates wonderful photographs of carefully selected backgrounds encapsulated in water drops.

The technique, while sound simple, is actually quite complex. It needs to control the shape of the drop, the background and the lighting to catch a perfect "refraction". Of course, the whole thing needs to be repeatable so Markus can adjust the final image. (This is not surprising from someone who can shoot two drops collide with a speeding pellet)

And if that was not enough, to take an image like that you need to focus twice: you need to focus the drop "lens" on the background and then you need to focus the "Real" lens on the drop.

The results are amazing. Click to continue ›