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Nikolta – A Minolta / Nikon Duct Tape & A Coffee Mixer Hybrid

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Photographer Joe Adams was not happy that his old Minolta lenses did not fit hos new Nikon D5000. He fixed that using some duct tape and a coffee mixer. Can anything be simpler?

Having received a Minolta Maxxum 7000, and a few lenses but no film, I was still determined to make something out of nothing. Intrigued by the Minolta 50mm f/1.7 AF lens that I was given, I set out to make it work on my Nikon D5000. I new it wouldn’t mount up but the Minolta mount was slightly larger than the Nikon F mount so the lens didn’t wobble or fall into the D5000. I decided to use duct tape (green was all I had!) and tape the lens to the camera, and to my surprise it worked pretty well! Here’s how I did it…[Read More…]

Understanding Lighting With An Egg

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Happy Easter/Passover everyone! I thought that this little video is a good fit for today, as the main character here is the Egg (no offense, Joe).

In this short video Joe Edelman uses an egg to explain a bit about portraiture lighting by having a single source of light move over an egg. It is kinda like our portrait lighting cheat sheet card, only in video.

If you want to see more of Joe’s great work, we have featured his excellent tutorials before.

Getting Started With Cross Polarized Light

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Polarizer filters can be used to enhance contrast and saturation in landscape photography and reduce reflections or glare on shiny surfaces such as water. The effect is maximized by aligning the polarizer on the camera so that the polarizing direction is perpendicular to that of the light you want to block.

On a bright day it works best if you are in a 90 degrees angle to the sun, but there will always be some light reflected by the surrounding or diffused by clouds which still reduce the effect. (See the differnce between the right and left sides of the image below)

Getting Started With Cross Polarized Light

This article shows how a polarizing filter for a flash allows to make use of the effect with artificial light. Some subjects will look gorgeous while others may be rendered in an odd way but it’s certainly fun playing with the effect and you can still vary the level by turning your filter on the lens. In a nutshell, we are going to polerize the light coming from the strobe to better control its specular higlights.

Every lightsource could be modified to emmit polarized light. But some devices (such as displays and some lasers) already emmit polarized light. See the images below for examle images illuminated with an iPad.

[Read More…]

Comparing The D800 Against The Canon 5D mkIII

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We don’t usually feature camera tech reviews here on DIYP, but Kevin Good took an in depth look at both the new D800 and the 5D mk3 cameras and made a really comprehensive comparison. (Also comparing various ways to spend $20 on Craigslist).

Among the test: Still resolution, Video performance and rigidness.

[Read More…]

A Coffee Sleeve Lens Hood

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We featured some crazy starbucks hacks before and we featured some lens-hood hacks before, but we never featured any lens-hood coffee hack before.

Well, there is a first for everything. Flickr user Nick Cool just submitted this interesting lens hood hack made from a disposable coffee holder.

here is how Nick describes it:

Sometimes a lens hood is needed, but unless they are integrated to the lens, they are big and not easy to transport.

I used a hot cup sleeve as lens hood, not a brilliant idea but good enough to save the day.#

[Read More…]

How To Build The Easiest Motorized Slider

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Here is one memorable quote, “It is a slider, not a roller after all“. This comes from Dan Colvin, a film maker and a unicyclist that was set to build a slider that would be easy to build, even if you are not a certified maker. To meet this end, Dan removed any complicated mechanisms from his slider, eliminating wheels, pipes, metal work and leaving only a felt covered 2 by 4 and a stretch of plywood as the basic elements of the slider.

The slider is powered by a K’nex motor that pulls the felt covered 2 by 4. I must say that I was kind of skeptic about how smooth the action would be. I was surprised. It is very smooth. See for yourself in the footage below followed by a build guide. While the footage shows a small smart phone for cam, I think it would work for larger cameras too.

Following is some demo footage, followed by an instructional video

[Read More…]

Optical Low-Pass Filter Removed From 5D Mark III

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Looks like today is hacking new cameras day. After the unobtrusive $30 WiFi hack for the D4 comes a much braver hack for the 5D MKIII. Film maker James Miller was brave enough to break open his brand new 5D MKIII and removes the anti aliasing filter (or Low Pass Optical Filter – LPOF) from his camera.

The anti aliasing filter serves an important function in the camera’s digital workflow. It removes some of the “real world” data so it matches the resolution of the camera sensor. This artificial “downgrade” contributes towards a smoother image.

But anything comes with a cost, and the cost of using an Anti Aliasing filter is decrease in resolution.

So, here comes James Miller and surgically removes the anti aliasing filters from his 5D mkIII. On the plus side the modified Canon now produces drastically sharper movies. On the down side, he must have had a heart attack. On the down side, it seems that a piece of glass needed to replace the filter to prevent back-focusing.[Read More…]

Add WiFi To Your Nikon D4 For $30

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If you are one of the lucky few who now own a Nikon D4 (which means you could both shell about $6,000 and managed to get in line early enough) there is a good chance that you wondered why Nikon did not include WiFi on its flagship.

It does include an Ethernet port allowing for wired control and live view, but no WiFi.

You could of course, add WiFi with the WT-5A, but that would mean saying goodbye to another $900. This is kinda weird of Nikon side, especially when the lower-end, soon to be announced, D3200 is rumored to have WiFi capabilities.

Nikon Rumors shares a great hack an interesting, and more affordable option to add WiFi capabilities to the D4 (or any camera with an Ethernet port for that matter) – using a VAP11G portable WiFi bridge.

[Read More…]

Cokin’s Graduated ND filters – A Product Review

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Hey guys!

Benjamin Von Wong – Montreal Based photographer here! I recently reviewed for you a set of teleconverters, and this time wanted to follow up with a set of Graduated ND filters from Cokin supplied to me during my trip to Africa by the nice fellows over at B&H!

As you may probably know, a graduated ND filter is essentially a square plate of glass that darkens the image gradually from top to bottom. What’s fun about the filter set from Cokin is that it comes with various “densities” of darkness that are stackable. What this means is that you have a pretty good control over how big of a change in dark-light transitions that you can do. Additionally, since the filter rests on a ring, you can rotate the filters to manually control the angle of the gradient! [Read More…]

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