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Very Cool Optical Slave Unit

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This guest post was made by Rolf Randby, the same person who wrote the Hot Shoe Adapter article. In fact, This slave trigger was the “trigger” (pan intended) for building the hot shoe adapter in the first place.

There are some Gazillion optical slaves out there. We even one optical slave unit published on this site. So what is so special about this circuitry? Rolf used a PIC (Programmable Interrupt Controller) to give this unit some very nice features: 1. No setup 2. It will work with a red eye setting in your camera. Yep, those annoying red-eye pre-flashes will not trigger the flash, it will “magically know” when the main slash if fired and activate the unit. 3. It will work with all point and shoot cameras.

Those three nice features accomplished with PIC hex code written by Evan Dudzik, from a algorithm by Rolf, make this unit an optimal optical slave unit for P&S cameras. It is the reason I call it the “Very Cool Optical Slave Unit”. Rolf, for some reason, insists on the boring name “STF 1”. I’ll stick with my name – “Very Cool Optical Slave Unit” or VeCOSU :).[Read More…]

Back to Basics

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Isn’t it fun to take a pile of PVC pipes and turn it into a studio? Or to take an old sheet and make it a first class photography backdrop? Some of those trash reused highly complex – space age technologies require nothing but two good hands, showing that no studio equipment is out of reach for the poor enthusiastic photographer. This is especially true when it come to mono-e-mono Vs. them high end gear guys.

Collecting all those DIY stories over the last year and a half or so, helped me realize that random stuff you find around your house good equipment is only half the key to taking good pictures. The other half is having good understanding of photography. Yet the third half is creativity or the ability to get creative. (yea, yea, I know that 150% of being a good photographer. But hey! if you really know it all you can get to be a 150% photographer… )[Read More…]

DIY – Hot Shoe Adapter

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The following guest post was made by Rolf Randby, a fellow DIY-er, who has two right hands (this is yet another manifestation of Darwin’s Evolution – The survivor of the guys who make stuff instead of buying them). The problem which Rolf was facing, is how to build a hot shoe mount for a flash trigger he made. Instead of running to the nearest photo store, he came up with a pretty cheap nice solution, that involves taking a part an old camera. This is also a good solution if your flash does not have a pc-sync outlet, as many of the commercial radio triggers use a phone jack to send the signal to the flash.

So to start this project of you will need an old camera that has a hot-shoe mount. Those are available at a lot of junk stores for a dollar or so. This camera is going to be disassembled – faint of heart – beware![Read More…]

My Sea Is Dripping? Photoshop To The Rescue

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Allot of times you’ll look at two very similar pictures, and say "Man, the left picture looks great, the right one is nice, but the left – Man I love it". Eight times out of ten, this difference can be explained by something called rules of composition. There are many such rules, (The Rule of Thirds is one known example, but there are many more). The rules of composition are a set of thumb rules to help the photographer rely on experience gathers in many years of art. (I was trying to avoid the whole "breaking the rules" argument, but feel free to comment) One such rule simply says Keep Your Horizon Straight. It’s a simple rule to follow, just make sure your camera is leveled when you take the shot. If you miss that rule, you’ll sometime hear comments about people falling to the side, or having the sea spilled out of the frame – some persons can not resist this remark. Some of the new DSLR models can help you with this task. Nikon’s D80 (or Nikon’s D70) for example can display a grid on the view finder, and you just need to make sure the horizon aligns with that line. There are also some nifty accessories you can attach to your hot shoe mount if you have one, see this nice gizmo from Hakuba for example.

But leveling the horizon can be sometimes tricky. When you take lots of shot, when you don’t have time to aim well or when you don’t have anything to level against.[Read More…]

DIY – The Panorama Head El Cheapo!

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How to take good panoramas? Sounds simple, right? Take some shots with some overlapping landscape, go to your favorite stitching software, and stitch them up (I like panorama tools AKA PT, and autostich AKA autostich). Right? Not exactly…

If you’ve done a panorama or two, you must have noticed those annoying vertical stitching lines. Some are caused by wide angle distortion, some due to Polarizer filter that stayed on, and some are the “software’s fault”. Allot of those annoying stitching lines are caused due to something called parallax. In layman’s terms Parallax means that your camera’s focal plan does not “sit” (or as Neo would say – is “not in one”) with rotations axis of your camera. confused? Here is a great article to explain this. So if you want to get professional panoramas you need to do something about it; This something is called Using the Nodal Point (is it me, or does this term sounds a bit weird). Curious? here is how you find your Nodal Point. Of course DIYPhotography.net is not the first to find this Nodal thing. you can always get some cheap accessories for panorama at Manfrotto. Or you can try and build one yourself, just like Stefan Lindgren – DIY-er extraordiner.[Read More…]

Flash photography – ACE of bounce

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Step right up, young man, my lady. Come photographers – You are about to see some card magic that will leave you amazed. This very special card magic was thought to me by the Harry Potter himself ancient wizards of Tibet, passed on from generation to generation (from when flash photography was invented). You may say it is a slight of hands, an illusions of the eye, distraction of the mind. But I tell you NO, my friends this is true magic. It is called “The ACE of Bounce”.

Now, does anyone in the audience has a card deck, any card deck will do. Yes sir, step right up. Please tell me where did you by this deck? At your usual K-mart, I see. is there anything special about this very regular Bicycle deck of card? No you say, well let us see.[Read More…]

Studio DIY – Softboxing The World – A Home Grown Softbox

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A softbox is a studio thingy that professional photographers use on their studios. Why? for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, softboxes create a smoother light – less hotspots (yea – those are the bright, burnt our noses in your photos), anther is smoother shadows. Most professional models are shot with softboxes to get that glamorous, look. Softboxes are also great for macro shots – they produce even diffused light.

The only trouble starts when you head down the road to the store and want to get one of them nice wonders. They usually cost something like a small county side house. In this article I will demonstrate how to build a homemade studio softbox for just a few $$.[Read More…]

Two wacky ideas for DIY project

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So, it turns out that there are some great DIY going on and that people will stop at nothing to get their perfect shot. Be it making a kid laugh or getting the perfect light for your street shot, you guys show me again and again that there is nothing that beats some good ‘ol imagination and handymanism (handy-man-ism).

The following two project diverse in almost everything – amount of technical knowledge, attitude and purpose. They are both the same in the sense that nothing is impossible when you want to get something the right way and willing/wanting to think out of the box.[Read More…]

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