Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve featured our share of DIY sliders. Heck, I met Stefan through his DIY slider about 10 years ago. Some are more complex than others, and some are stupidly fun and simple.
This DIY slider project from Jan Derogee is a nice combination that is (kinda) simple yet feature-packed. The project will require a bit of electronics know-how, but it goes in the weekend project bin.
We received a nifty little Actobotics slider kit from ServoCity and over the winter I had the opportunity to shoot a mix of live action and cell phone time lapse video and also a little bit of GoPro video with the slider.
In this post I am going to review the Actobotics slider as a tool for creating movement in both live action video and GoPro or cell phone time lapse video.
Most of you know that I love sliders and that using a slider in a video shoot is a great way to get more value in your video production.
This next slider from pixelriffic is not the fanciest slider, but it is the kind of slider that you can build for about $20, a trip to home depot and one hour of work. It has no moving parts, and everything about it is off the shelf parts (even the felt is precut).
Definitely something to keep in mind if you get stuck without a slider in a parking lot next to a home depot and only have 1 hour till the shoot starts.[Read More…]
This is a pretty novel idea for a camera slider, called Slidee from maker Shivam Dehinwal. It has no motors, no Bluetooth, no electronics at all and no batteries. It’s built around a regular retractable tape measure. Well, ok, a not-quite-regular retractable tape measure. It’s built specifically around the Komelon Touch Lock measuring tape because it has built-in speed control – which is important when you want to control how quickly your camera moves.
It’s very cool, using a simple 3D printed housing with some bearing wheels and a simple mechanism to hold the retraction button at different positions to adjust the retraction speed. Essentially, the button acts like a variable speed control. The harder you push it, the quicker it retracts. You will, of course, need a 3D printer – or a friend willing to make the printed components – but this is about as simple as it gets.
Some of you might remember DSLR DIY CNC from last year’s post about those neat 3D printed custom lens caps. This have been pretty quiet from the since, but now they’re back and sticking to the “CNC” part of their name with a new motorised 4-axis camera slider. Four axes because one runs along the slider, two are the pan and tilt with the fourth being focus control, so you can track subjects during your move.
While there isn’t yet a complete YouTube video to go along with the build, dslrdiy (as he’s known on Instructables) has posted a teaser. He’s also posted written instructions, along with downloads for all of the code, Marlin configuration files, STL files, and instructions on how to build and customise it to your liking on Instructables.
There are as many different camera sliders out there on the market as there are cameras. If not more so and you can spend an absolute fortune getting every possible feature you could think of. But nothing beats building your own, and this DIY camera slider from Sasa Karanovic is probably one of the more compact and feature-packed builds we’ve seen here on DIYP because it supports multiple axes.
As well as just moving your camera down the length of the slider, it will also rotate the camera. It’ll even let you control the two simultaneously for some nice orbit-style slider shots. It’s based around an ESP32 microcontroller and the whole thing is controlled over WiFi using a web interface from your phone – or your tablet, computer, whatever.
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.
Building your own motorised camera gimbal or slider seem to be the in thing at the moment. In fact, I built one myself recently (that’s for another post, though). This one, though, from Michael Klements at The DIY Life is pretty cool and incorporates a slider with a motorised pan axis so that it can track a subject as it moves from one end of the rail to the other.
It’s a total DIY project with a bunch of off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed components that Michael has designed himself. And while he doesn’t appear to have released the project under an open-source license, he has made the STL files and the source code available to download so that you can have a go at building your own.
Keeping cameras steady or having complete control over their position is important, regardless of whether you’re shooting photos or video. We’ve already covered cameras, lenses and lighting, so in this gift guide, we’re going to be taking a look at tripods, sliders and gimbals. Let’s start off small and build our way up.
So far in this year’s DIYP gift guides, we’ve covered cameras, lenses, lights and bags. But whether you shoot stills or video, at some point you’ll likely need something to mount your camera to. So here are some of the new ones that have come out over the last year or so and the ones that we use the most.
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