Complete Camera Gear Set DIY Painted With Desert Mirage Lizard Military Grade Paint

Photographer Alexy Joffre Frangieh usually does high end time lapse movies. But as much as we love time lapses, this is not why we are featuring Alexy on the blog today.

Having his gear catch heat during long time lapses, Alexy went ahead and applied a military grade compound called Desert Mirage Lizard. His short and sweet description of the job says: “hand airbushing, fine masking ,no dismounting”.

Which to me is quite outstanding, as painting a camera and even more so a lens without dissembling it can cause serious damage to the glass + the paint job is so good, it almost seems as Nikon decided to go united-colors-of-Pentax themselves.

The colored set includes A Nikon D4 and the following lenses: 14-24mm, 28-70mm, 80-200mm & 400mm all f/2.8 and an SB 900

DIYP asked Alexy why he did the paint job and he had three reasons:

For aesthetics (which kinda makes sense as it is pretty rad)
For heat dissipation (The Nikon black absorbs a lot of heat and between the Mediterranean sun, and the long durations of time lapses, the gear stays in better health when it reflects some of the heat).
the third reason knocked us over: “I have all cameras from D1 to D4, 11 models, so simply a change“.

Alexy tells us that it took around two days of masking the gear with adhesives cut on a vinyl cutting plotter; 2 days of spraying; The gear was useable on the forth day; And it settled to its final states (after evaporation) within 3 weeks.

The hoods were painted from the inside except for the 400 because it come in velvet. Tested in flaring situations, the hoods didn’t seem the add any artifacts to these that might already exist in the lenses.

Here are some pictures of the painted gear, head over to Alexy’s Facebook album for more.