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You can use pretty much anything as a camera lens – even shoes and potatoes

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When it comes to weird lenses, Mathieu Stern is pretty much the undisputed king. But it seems we have a contender for that title who’s out to prove that you can use pretty much anything as a camera lens – as long as it’s a pinhole camera lens – as German film director and photographer Simon Meyer has been showing off on TikTok. Everything from potatoes and shoes to rolls of toilet paper and even a cuddly toy Elmo.

As mentioned, you are limited to basically using it as a pinhole camera, but differently sized objects essentially allow you to get a different focal length. Sure, you could just use an empty tube for something like this and cut it to to the length you need, but where’s the fun in that?

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How to put together your own photo and video cinematography cart

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If you regularly work and shoot in the same location, like a studio or a set place in your home, keeping things both organised and readily available at a moment’s notice can be quite difficult. After all, when stuff’s organised, it’s typically packed away somewhere in a cupboard or drawer. This makes it easy to find things, but for things you’re using regularly, it adds a lot of time to the workflow to keep taking it out and putting it back.

That’s where a studio cart comes in handy. In this video, Pal2Tech’s Chris Lee put together his own, based around an inexpensive metal cart with wheels, which is divided up into sections for all of the various bits he needs to have at hand all the time in his studio.

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How I built a DIY 180 orbiting rig using readily available parts

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I recently built this DIY 180 orbit rig from available camera accessories. To make shots like this. You might think why not just use a turntable, well I don’t like the look of only the product spinning while the background is static. While moving the camera around the subject gives a much more dynamic look in its entirety.

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How I made a DIY remote mechanical cable release for my large format cameras

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If you have been reading my blog or watching my YouTube channel, you would know that I do mainly large format photography. I often take my own self portrait for using my pneumatic cable release that has a long cable and air bulb release.

However, I have always been thinking about how to make a more modern kind of remote cable release and hence this project.

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We 3D printed a giant lithophane photo of the Mandalorian

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It’s not really a secret that we’re big fans of 3D printing here at DIYP. Whether it’s printing out handy gear that we’ll use all the time, functional workhorse tools, or making the cameras themselves, 3D printing is just a lot of fun and it’s worked the way into the lives of the DIYP team in a big way. And speaking of big, big’s where we’re going this time.

We’ve covered how to 3D print lithophanes on here before. They’re a way of creating a form that produces an image when you shine light through the back of it. The thinner parts are brighter and the thicker parts are darker, producing the contrast you need to see the image. Well, when Tronxy reached out to see if we’d like to try their Tronxy XY-3 SE 3D printer, a giant lithophane was what we knew we had to do.

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How to optimise your mirrorless camera tilt screen for waist level shooting with a piece of wood

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If you just want to shoot from the waist then this is a tutorial for you.

The idea spans around taking a Canon EOS M200 (or a similar camera with a tilting screen) and adding a wedge-shaped piece of wood (40x55x800mm). Together they change this camera into a Hasselblad 907x lookalike. It’s something of a follow-up to my 2015 article on how to do this with a Canon Powershot N.

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How to make a DIY telephoto pinhole lens from a Pringles can

There’s an unusual amount of photo-related stuff you can make from a simple Pringles can: a macro flash diffuser, an extension tube, or a “saberstrip.” Sean of Fotodiox brings you another cheap and simple Pringles project: a DIY pinhole lens. In this video, he’ll show you how to do it and list all the things you need, and I bet you already have most of these at home.

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This guy designed and 3D printed a mount to use Canon EF lenses on his Gameboy Camera and the results are awesome

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Well, we’ve seen a few experiments with the Gameboy camera over the years, but this one is pretty wild. YouTuber, car nut and 3D printing fanatic Conorsev has developed and printed an adapter that lets him mount Canon EF mount lenses to his Nintendo Gameboy Camera and it produces images far greater than the Gameboy ever deserved. While it might be a pretty crazy idea, it makes for some particularly intriguing and very unique photographs.

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Cloning lens elements using silicone and epoxy resin

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I’ve been following the YouTube channel Breaking Taps for quite a long time. It’s a fun mix of science, engineering and technology covering physics and the occasional bit of chemistry with some just flat out cool experiments, crazy tech and fascinating slow motion in between – like that time when he made his own scanning laser microscope (it’s pretty cool, you should watch it).

Well, now he’s having a go at making some optical lens elements. And it turns out, making lenses from epoxy resin is a bit more difficult than one might initially think.

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This DIY night vision motion-activated camera films garden wildlife while you’re not around

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It’s funny. Sometimes, you have an idea for something you want to make and right as it’s all coming together and you’re starting to get everything figured out, somebody posts a project that is almost exactly what you need. It’s even better when they’re using pretty much the exact same hardware you’ve already bought for your project.

A user who goes simply by the name of Sam on Hackaday has created a night vision motion camera based on a Raspberry Pi Zero, an infrared camera module and a PIR motion sensor to detect for warm-blooded subject movement. While you could use this for security, Sam’s been using his to capture the local wildlife.

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