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Here’s a bullet time video booth you can build yourself

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Ok, so this is going to require something of a budget. This is because of the simple fact that shooting bullet time requires a whole mess of cameras in order to pull it off. But this creation from Sebastian Staacks takes bullet time to the next level. Designed as an alternative to the standard photo booths often seen at weddings and events, Sebastian’s project is a bullet-time video booth.

As well as the usual array of stills around a subject, it also shoots video, allowing you to capture a short clip before spinning around the subject, and then it comes back to the video at the end. It’s an interesting project, with a lot of problem-solving and challenges to overcome. Sebastian walks us through the process, including everything from picking the cameras to creating the final result.

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The 3D printed MicBack turns your on-camera mic into a wireless shotgun

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Despite being referred to as on-camera microphones, the array of such microphones from companies like Rode, Deity, Sennheiser and others are just as capable when used as an off-camera microphone, too. However, the one problem with using them off-camera is that the cables supplied with them are extremely short. After all, they’re only designed to go from your hotshoe to your microphone socket.

Even if you do pick up a long third-party cable, these microphones aren’t designed for long cable runs. The best option is to use them wirelessly. That, too, can be tricky on the end of a boom pole. However, Caleb Pike at DSLR Video Shooter has created a great-looking solution, called the MicBack, to solve this problem with several small on-camera shotgun microphones.

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How I turned my bedroom closet into a darkroom for $20

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A few years ago I had a great darkroom setup in my basement that I converted from a (mostly) unused bathroom. It had a wet side and a dry side, built-in exhaust, and plenty of space.

That came to an end when I sold that house and moved into an old Victorian-style home where bathrooms are a sparse thing and any plumbing in the home was an afterthought.

Not long after relocating, I started to ponder how I could possibly create a darkroom space at the new house. Of course, I had grandiose dreams of a new build that was even better than my previous space.

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This Raspberry Pi project stitches together images of passing trains

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This is quite a fascinating concept. Based around a Raspberry Pi, it takes photographs – lots of photographs – of trains passing through a station and then stitches them together to create a single long composite of the entire locomotive. It works on a similar principle to slit-scan photography, which is often used for capturing fast-moving subjects passing a fixed point – like horses finishing a race.

Slit-scan photography in the digital age typically shoots a stream of 1-pixel wide vertical slices. This is required if you’re trying to the capture speed between multiple moving objects, such as in a horse race. But in this project by “jo-m“, the “slits” are a little wider, which means fewer images are required in order to composite the final result together. But for applications such as this, it’s all that’s needed.

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This guy strapped a Super 8 movie camera to an FPV drone

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There are times when YouTube presents us with something so insane and cool that we not only go, “Wow!” but also, “How has it taken this long for somebody to do this?”. This is one such video. The creation of Australian film photographer Jason De Freitas – whom we’ve featured here on DIYP before – this is an FPV drone with a Super 8 film camera strapped to the top of it.

Making the two things work together involved a little CAD and 3D printing to create a mount and a servo to trigger the record button. It also meant using actual movie film, developing and scanning it – which is not cheap. But the results are so worth it.

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How I shot a HDR tintype with a super-fast lens

When shooting wet plates, you deal with a very light-insensitive process (about ISO 0.5). So most wet plate artists want to get their hand on a fast lens. Wolfgang, a former participant of my wet plate workshop got his hand on a very fast lens and sent it over to me. For the first time, you can get the plates from this project on eBay, starting from 1 Euro.

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I turned a 3D printer into a $400, four axis motion controller

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Videographer and Tinkerrer Pedro Callisaya just created what’s probably the cheapest four-axis motion controller (and even the basic ones don’t run cheap). He did this using a scraped 3D printer, which, to be honest, I am surprised never happened before in the modders community. (if the name sounds familiar, it’s because this is a second iteration of an ongoing project)

While the build is relatively easy for what you get, it is not the first project I would go for if I were just starting with electronics. That said, if you played with electronics a bit, this would be a fantastic weekend project to try out. You can download the project files here on a pay-what-you-think-is-fair basis.

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How I made a 3D-printed movie camera that uses 35mm film

A couple of years ago I have been occasionally shooting 35mm films with point&shoot still cameras while also having the desire to shoot motion picture films. Upon reviewing my options, the best way would be to do it with Super8 film, but after financial considerations, I concluded that it would be very costly in the long run since shooting just one standard 50 ft cartridge wouldn’t be enough for me. Purchasing, developing, and digitalizing costs for just one would be over €100! And not to mention the long turnaround time of a few weeks! There had to be a better solution to the problem.

After researching, since I had some experience with 3D designing and printing, electronic design, and coding, I came up with the idea to build my own analog motion picture film camera. I’ve decided that my camera would utilize the standard 35mm film cartridges since these are cheaper and are widely available in much larger quantities and type varieties (B&W, Color, Reversal, UV, IR, special kinds …) and can be bulk loaded.

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This guy stuffed a Gameboy camera inside a Holga

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Of all the film-to-digital camera conversions I’ve seen, this has to be one of the most fun. I mean, who wouldn’t want to turn what is ordinarily a medium format film camera – even if it is a “toy camera” – into a 128×128 monochrome digital camera? I suppose it’s fitting that the creator of this one went with a Gameboy camera, in-keeping with that “toy camera” theme.

It’s the creation of photographer Michael Fitzmayer, and it utilises the Gameboy Camera module and an ESP32 microcontroller. It has no controls other than a button to shoot a photo. You can’t adjust any settings at all. There’s no screen to preview your shot or review images back, either. You just look through the little plastic viewfinder to get a rough idea of composition, hit the shutter and hope for the best.

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This photographer converted a 60-year-old Yashica from analogue to digital

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In the years since photographers started transitioning from film to digital in the early 2000s, many companies promised conversion kits. Devices you could put inside a film camera to turn it into digital cameras. None of them ever really materialised. But thanks to devices like the Raspberry Pi, DIY analogue to digital conversions have become quite popular projects.

In his debut video, photographer and YouTuber Malcolm Jay shows off his custom DIY conversion. Inspired by projects such as the Becca Cam, he modified a broken Yashica Electro 35, adding a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera to bring his 1960s 35mm SLR into the 21st century.

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