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I finally used my DIY UV box for making Van Dyke wet prints – Here’s my complete process

It’s been a little while since I built my UV Box but sometimes, life gets in the middle of our fun projects! Now, I’ve finally tested the UV Box and I can say that it works great. I made a test with two different negatives: a very soft flower subject lighted with painted light and a very sharp subject lighted with a very contrasty light. I wanted to see how this printing process deals with different subjects.

I proceeded with some step tests to find the corrected exposure for my negatives. I did 2 seconds steps and as you can see in the video, I was a little optimistic with my first strip of 2,4,6,8 seconds of exposure. In the end, the correct exposure resulted in 11 minutes.

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Photographer hacks his old phone to take film photos

I’m pretty sure all of us have at least one old phone collecting dust in the depths of some drawer. And to be fair, it’s difficult to put it to good use. But Iranian photographer Alireza Rostami thought of something pretty cool to repurpose his broken old phone: he turned it into a film camera.

You may already know Alireza. He’s a is a super-creative and resourceful photographer who’s shared a few of his DIY projects with us before. Each is more creative than the other, and now he’s made something pretty cool again. He has kindly shared his photos and some backstory with DIYP, so let’s see how he turned a camera phone into a film camera phone.

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How to build your own DIY acoustic panels to treat your room for recording audio

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If you’ve ever tried shooting a video indoors where good sound is important, you’ve no doubt come across the issue of reverb. It’s the echo that you typically hear in a recording in an untreated room with a microphone placed too far from your subject. It’s an issue that most indoor spaces face, but it’s one that can be overcome with a little work.

The team at Syrp Lab recently rebuilt their gear room for filming in and they’ve faced this challenge. So, in this video, they build their own DIY acoustic panels to help treat the space and deal with some of the echo picked up by their cameras and microphones.

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How to make a gorgeous DIY hand-painted backdrop

 

There is more than one way to make a custom backdrop for your photography. There is also more than one way to do it: it’s usually cheap, you can make it exactly as you imagine, and as many as you want.

In this video, Luke Cleland shares his method of making a DIY canvas backdrop. You don’t need any fancy ingredients or tons of money, you can make it at home and customize it to pretty much any shooting need you have.

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This is this the most versatile thing in a photo studio?

What is the most versatile item in your studio? Is it your camera that can take photos and video? Or maybe your laptop you use for tethering, editing, and chatting with your clients? Perhaps it’s your speedlight or a V-flat which both can be used in a variety of ways.

The most versatile item in Filip Soukup’s studio is none of the above. In fact, this Czech photographer argues that, for him, it’s a simple, cheap, and easy-to-build DIY item. It’s a board you can easily make on your own, and in his video, Filip shows you how… and why.

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Fixing the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with 3D printing

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3D printing has evolved a lot over the last decade or so. We’ve gone from super basic and pretty brutal looking printers that you had to feed nylon weed whacker string into (because nobody was producing filament) to the pretty accurate and reliable printers we have available to us today. With that improved accuracy, better quality filaments and better software, we’re able to print some pretty cool things now.

Like, in the case of Witono at Witonosfreestyle, spare parts to repair his Olympus OM-D E-M1 Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera. Electronically, his Olympus OM-D E-M1 worked just fine, but there were a few parts missing, like the accessory port cover, the eyepiece and somewhat importantly, the battery cover lever. He wasn’t happy about these missing parts, so, he designed and 3D printed his own.

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I built a Frankenstein large format wet plate camera from scratch for photographing ghosts

Corrine at Corrine West Photography booked a wet plate workshop with me before the pandemic started. Two years later we were finally able to do it. The main subject was to get comfortable with the wet collodion process and to create images similar to the ones of spirit photographer William H. Mumler. Mr. Mumler created images (probably double exposures) where his clients could take a picture with their deceased relatives.

The photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the “ghost” of her husband (Abraham Lincoln) was his most famous one. Corrine found my double exposure wet plates and that was the reason she contacted me in the first place. About two months before the workshop Corrine surprised me with a question: “Can we build a wet plate camera together?”. I talked with a friend and after a long visit to a DIY market, I was sure that we can do it. A DIY Camera and capturing ghosts. That sounds like a fun workshop to me!

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You can now get a 64-megapixel auto focus camera for the Raspberry Pi

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Well, it was almost inevitable, really. With high-resolution sensors coming to smartphones over the last couple of years, it was only a matter of time before we saw them coming to camera modules for the Raspberry Pi. While you might not want to use your Pi as your main camera, they are often used in a lot of AI vision systems. This one is the Pi Hawk-eye from the folks at ArduCam and it shoots up to a crazy 9152×6944 resolution.

It offers both manual and autofocus with “DSLR-like” focus control and has the same form factor and uses the same software (libcamera) as the original Raspberry Pi V1 and V2 cameras. You can even hook four of these things up together on a single Pi for multicam viewing and depth mapping. And no, it’s not being crowdfunded. They’ve just made it, announced it and put it up for pre-order!

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You might cut your CFexpress card costs in half by using an M.2 NVMe SSD in this adapter

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As the drop-in replacement for XQD and the logical successor to CFast 2.0, CFexpress is the hot new format that’s most definitely here to stay. But CFexpress cards are still relatively fresh and new… and expensive. While 256GB SD cards can be picked up for as little as $54, and even UHS-II ones can be found for under $100, 256GB CFexpress cards typically start at around $200.

But there is another option, as detailed by Joseph Nuzzo over on Photofocus. You can also use an M.2 NVMe SSD inside Sintech CFexpress Type-B M.2 NVMe 2230 SSD adapter. NVMe SSDs are significantly less expensive than CFexpress cards, allowing for larger capacities for less money while still being able to get the speed capabilities for which you need a CFexpress card in the first place.

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Three cheap and easy DIY reflectors you can use to take your portraits to the next level

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Reflectors are one of the most valuable tools a portrait photographer can own. And we’re not talking about monetary value, but usefulness. Their cost is relatively inexpensive, but the value they can bring to your images can be pretty immense. But what if you’re just starting out and don’t want to buy one or several reflectors of varying sizes? Or what if you just don’t have the size and shape of reflector you need in an emergency?

Well, here’s Jay P Morgan from The Slanted Lens here to save the day with three DIY options that you can repurpose for use as very effective reflectors. You might already even own one or all of the things he shows off in the video and not even thought about using it as a reflector before.

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