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At some point, many of us will have a camera that just doesn’t feel right when it comes to shutter speeds. Maybe we’re seeing flicker when we’re shooting timelapse, or perhaps we have an old camera that doesn’t seem as quick anymore.
In the olden days, confirming shutter speeds was no easy feat. It required some specialised hardware and a book of charts to compare. These days, you can do it with an Arduino and a couple of lasers. This project by Stuart Brown shows you how.
If there’s one essential item for macro photography, aside from a macro lens (or extension tubes), it’s a macro focusing rail. We’ve featured a few focusing rails here on DIYP before, like the NiSi NM-180 (review here), as well as some other DIY solutions. This one, from Curious Scientist, is an ongoing project based around an Arduino Nano that uses a stepper motor to move your camera along a rail in fine increments.
I say it’s an ongoing project because since releasing his first video on his motorised macro rail slider only a month ago, he’s already posted an update showing almost a complete redesign of the staging platform on which you mount the camera. Depending on your camera and needs, either design might work very well for you, so I’ve included his videos below for both of them.
Shooting multi-frame panorama photographs can be fun, and the resulting images can be striking. But once you get past a panorama that is, say, four or five frames wide, it becomes difficult to do without a tripod. And if you want a panorama that is more than one frame in height, then hand-held is nigh impossible.
There are manual panorama heads you can mount on your tripod, but using one can become a bit tedious, especially shooting a dozen or so frames. They become more onerous when you want a pano that is several rows high.
DIY camera sliders come in all shapes and sizes… Well, sizes, anyway. They’re usually all a pretty similar shape. Long poles along which a platform moves. But this one, I thought, was particularly interesting. Not all of the information has been released on it yet, although it’s expected to be teased over the next day or two as the video gains more attention.
It was posted to YouTube by MERT Arduino & Tech and like many DIY sliders, it’s powered by an Arduino. What makes this one stand out particularly, though, is that it features a joystick remote control, letting you operate it from afar without having to touch it.
Getting started with Arduino Nano and Python is easy thanks to extensive online documentation and an increasing DIY culture.
Waiting whilst flatbed scanners scan a colour negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent colour precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two. Tools available today, such as Negative Lab Pro, make it easy to achieve great colour negative conversions. So fastening the scanning process using a camera makes more sense than ever before. However, the software to automate this process so far did not exist. Until today!
The Flying Pixel Portrait Camera uses a video beamer, a single photoresistor, an Arduino and a PC for taking photos of people’s faces. The beamer ‘scans’ the image by projecting a small white square onto a person’s face inside an otherwise completely dark chamber. While the projected square slowly moves over the entire face, the photoresistor captures the reflected luminosities.
This generates a proportional analog electric signal which is digitized by an Arduino and transmitted to the PC. As the PC also controls the position of the projected square, it can now construct an image based on the different brightness values that it receives, one pixel at a time.
Control decks for Lightroom and other applications seem to be becoming all the rage these days. And for good reason. I’ve got the Loupedeck+, you can check out the review here, and it’s becoming a pretty valuable tool. More so for me if they ever add DaVinci Resolve support, though.
But what if you already have an Arduino and a bunch of components laying around and want to save some money? What if you just want to tinker and learn and play around with it for yourself? Well, for that, meet LRduino.
I needed a way to trigger a flash from an Electron app, but there wasn’t anything out there that suited my needs. At first I thought there would be a flash with a simple bluetooth interface, and there is. Unfortunately none of these flashes have a public API, and some even go to the trouble of encrypting their bluetooth messages. What the heck?!
I don’t have much experience with Arduino development, or electronics in general, but the market forced me into it! Fortunately this project is about as simple as it gets. If this is your first time tinkering with Arduino, it’s a good place to start.
Despite the proliferation of sliders, motorised ones are still quite expensive. Without motors, they’ve dropped to ridiculously low prices. But it’s really not that difficult or expensive to convert a standard manual slider into a motorised one.
This video from Max Maker demonstrates how to turn a very inexpensive slider into a more practical and useful one. It takes a little machining and a few parts, but it’s fairly straightforward. It just takes a little planning and a few tools.
Well, this sure is a surprise announcement, at least for me. Blackmagic Design have today announced their 3G-SDI Arduino Shield, allowing you to control your Blackmagic cameras from your own Arduino based DIY projects.
For those who’ve never come across the Arduino before, see here, here, here, here and here. I’ll wait, but there’s plenty more about it here on DIYP if you require some further reading. Basically, they’re a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but simpler and geared more towards hardware connectivity and rapid prototyping, than software development.
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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