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The Photon is a tiny open-source handheld light meter powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico

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Light meters have been a bit out of fashion for a while – although you’ll get my Sekonic from my cold dead hands! – but they have started to make a little bit of a comeback over the last couple of years. It’s partly due to the resurgence of film and cameras that don’t contain built-in meters but also the value that some photographers find it provides in their work. The only problem is light meters can be expensive!

Well, now there’s a new open-source incident light meter that you can build yourself for less than $50 – assuming you can find a Pi selling for RRP. It’s been created by VEEB, a group of Switzerland-based photographers who’ve taken to building their own kit. The Photon was created to provide incident light readings for shooting with Pentax Hasselblad and other old film cameras the VEEB team had that don’t have built-in light meters.

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The Photopistol is a 3D printable pistol grip for holding and shooting your camera

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While words like “shoot” might sometimes get you into trouble on certain social media platforms, this is a device that blurs the lines between its two typical uses. This is the Photopistol. It’s a pistol grip for mounting your camera two with a “trigger” that fires your camera. It’s designed by the user TH1813254617 on Printables, and it actually looks pretty neat – and perhaps more useful than a mere gimmick.

It’s inspired by the Soviet-era Photosniper and designed to be 3D printed. It’s also modular, allowing you to print different parts of it in different colours to suit your personal aesthetic. Below is a typical pistol grip with a trigger, and above is a mounting point for your camera with a 1/4-20″ thread. It’s not going to be to everybody’s tastes, but I can see where a mount like this could be advantageous.

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Call yourself a cookie addict? Well, here’s some Oreo lens and body caps you can 3D print

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3D printing offers us some wonderfully creative options for developing, prototyping, and ultimately making excellent practical tools to help us with our photography and filmmaking. It also allows us to be as silly as we want to be, too. Sometimes, the best of both worlds can be combined into something practical, yet also hilarious. As is the case with this particular design.

If you’re a Canon shooter with a 3D printer and a cookie addiction, this model uploaded by FloridaMan999 (what a name!) will really float your boat. It’s a set of Canon RF body and lens caps that look like Oreo cookies. There are also a couple of sets of Canon EF designs as well as a Nikon F body cap (no lens cap), although he says he hasn’t tested them yet.

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This 3D printed cage stops your microphone cable from falling out of the Rode Wireless GO II Transmitter

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Now, I have to admit, this isn’t a problem I’ve faced myself, but it is a problem I’ve seen a few other people mention, both in person and on social media. The Rode Wireless GO II is pretty much the standard by which others are judged when it comes to tiny wireless microphones. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best in every aspect, it just means they set the original standard because they’re the second generation of the first type.

One aspect where some users have issue is that the microphone cable occasionally pops out of the transmitter – or gets removed by talent and forgotten to be put back in again. As I mentioned, this isn’t a problem I’ve had but it’s one Caleb Pike’s had and he’s done something about it. He’s designed the Go-LOCK. It’s a 3D printable cage for the Wireless Go II transmitter that locks the mic in place and still gives you access to the belt clip.

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The “Pieca” is a Raspberry Pi powered camera with a Leica M lens mount

It feels like we’re having a big rush of Raspberry Pi based cameras recently. Lately, we’ve had the Paparazzo interchangeable C/CS mount camera, the accessible-anywhere Pi Cam, the Pi HQ Camera module-based Pikon, the instant animation printing Kinecam, and even seen a 65-year-old 8mm movie camera converted to digital completely non-destructively. Well now, it’s the turn of the Pieca.

This one’s pretty special. While most others have made use of the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Module to provide it with a native C/CS mount, this one created by Tom Schucker at Tea and Tech Time comes with a Leica M mount. It still uses the Pi HQ camera module with the Raspberry Pi 4, but being Leica M mount, you can adapt pretty much any DSLR lens ever made to work with it.

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This DIY 3D printed trinocular lens lets you lets you shoot digital wigglecams with your Sony camera

Wigglegrams are a fun thing to shoot and experiment with. For those who’ve never heard of them before, it’s essentially a sort of 3D photo, shooting an image with multiple lenses side-by-side next to each other and then turning them into an animated gif to help show some depth in the photo. You can even just take two of the images and try to turn them into a regular stereoscopic 3D image if you want.

We’ve featured them here on DIYP before, such as this one from Joshua Bird who made a 3D printed FD mount wigglegram lens for his Canon A1. Well, this one from Alex Fiel (aka scealux) has developed one for Sony E mount, that he uses with his Sony A6300 and produces some pretty awesome results. It makes use of 3D printing to create the mount and like Joshua’s camera, utilises the lenses from disposable 35mm cameras.

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This is the worst digital camera in the world with a resolution of only 48 pixels and no lens

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Digital camera sensors have come a very long way in the last few decades. Even just in the last 20 years, we’ve gone from the likes of the 4.1-Megapixel Nikon D2h to 100-megapixel monsters from Fuji, Hasselblad and Phase One. Hell, even smartphone camera sensors now boast 200-megapixel resolutions with a lot of neat digital wizardry. But as complex as processors have become, they’re very simple at their core.

This one, proudly proclaimed by its creator to be “the worst digital camera of all time ever”, shows that basic principle off extremely well. It was created by Peter Sanchez at Electromechanical Productions. It features an 8×6 grid of light-dependent resistors (LDRs) for a grand total of 48 pixels of resolution.

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The KineCAM is a DIY instant camera that prints out animated kinegrams

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It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kinegram. While the term “kinegram” wasn’t really coined until the late 1990s, the process has actually been around since the 1890s. I remember they seemed to be quite popular in some kids’ toys in the 1980s before the world started getting more digital and then they kind of disappeared for the most part.

But as with a lot of old tech returning to popular culture, it looks like the kinegram is back, too. PhD student Ticha Sethapakdi and her team at MIT produced an instant Kinegram camera, the KineCAM. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi, shoots multiple images in sequence and then prints out a single kinegram on thermal paper using its built-in printer. The KineCAM was also presented this year at SIGGRAPH 2022.

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The InfiniteDeck is a DIY alternative to the StreamDeck and Loupedeck Live

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While primarily aimed towards live streaming, products like the StreamDeck and particularly the Loupedeck Live have proven to be invaluable for photographers and filmmakers. They allow you to simulate keyboard shortcuts and potentially even talk directly to software through their own API. But such products are relatively expensive. Sure, the time they save makes up for their cost but wouldn’t it be better if there was an even cheaper alternative?

Well, thanks to Pedro at DSLR DIY CNC, there is! He designed his own “macropad” called the InfiniteDeck, based off an ESP32 with a capacitive touchscreen display that offers a very familiar interface and a very customisable system. It just plugs into your computer, emulating a keyboard and doesn’t even require any drivers.

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Here’s how to non-destructively convert a 65-year-old 8mm movie camera to digital

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Converting old film cameras, particularly movie cameras, to digital has become a lot more viable over the last few years as devices like the Raspberry Pi and small form factor cameras to go with them have become more prevalent – even if there’s still a massive shortage going on right now. We’ve seen projects pop up lately showing some very cool conversion projects but this one dates all the way back to 1957.

The subject of this particular conversion is the Bell and Howel 172 Magazine-loading 8mm camera. Created by Airpocket, his goal was to keep the camera as original as possible and keep the “keep modern modifications to a minimum”. Of course, he had to add a Raspberry Pi to record the image but that’s pretty much the only alteration to the camera. Everything else is pretty much as is.

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