Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Over the years we shared quite a few tutorials on scanning slides. Most were focused on how to light the slides correctly, and how to post process the files and how to adapt a macro lens for the job.
We never actually touched on the automation of slide scanning and this video by Victor Kaijser Bots explains in details how you can scan literally hundreds of slides in mere minutes.[Read More…]
So, the holidays have rolled around once again, and sometimes we like to look at your old, but memorable, pictures from years gone by. But, having converted my photographic efforts to a digital, I continue to postpone (again) the inevitable, and disagreeable job of converting the old negative or slide collection into an acceptable digital format. This universal reluctance to bring your photos into the 21st Century is usually the caused after finding out the apparent complexity of the project or, more oft than not, the cost of the equipment.
For the past 12 years, I’ve been happily using digital photo equipment, forever clinging to the distant hope that someday I would be able to view my photographs and slides on the TV or the computer screen. I well remember how it used to be fun to drag out the slide projector and display the slides. It has, unfortunately, become less and less convenient that without clear wall space to project on, it’s just not worth the effort as the old 6ft. “pull down” projection screens just don’t cut it any more. Besides the set up of projection equipment, darkening the room and the other rigmarole one has to go through to look at slides, has driven the ‘fun’ right out of the effort so that I almost never look at them anymore. I took thousands of pictures during my travels and a lot of them were quite good.
Being a student and Teacher’s Assistant of the late photography legend Roy DeCarava, composition and taking photos from the heart were the most important things I’ve learned as a photographer. Being an illustrator, I had always wanted to branch out back to my street art roots like my photography.
Photography is light. Light hits the subject, travels through a lens and hits a sensor or a piece of film, creating an image. Everything else is just there to assist.
However, light can definitely go the reverse way, with the laws of physics enabling a complete reversed path. Light coming from somewhere near the sensor plate, going through a lens and arriving at a screen or a wall re-building an image.
Come to think about it this is almost magical, yet this is how cinema came to be, and how some of our sweetest memories were created.[Read More…]
When I saw Vesa Lehtimäki‘s photos depicting the life on the freezing planet of Hoth I was immediately drawn to it. Partly because I am a Star Wars fan boy and partly because they looked so darn good that I had to learn more about how they were taken.
I mean, just swap those little plastic characters with people and you could actually believe that this series is photojournalism at its best.
I contacted Vesa and asked him a bit about the process, the setups and the inspiration for the series. The answers I got were a solid proof that inspiration and motivation trump gear and budget. [Read More…]
I love my iPhone, but I always felt that the 3.5 inch screen was a bit to small. Luckily, Instructabes user iamaledgend came up with a clever way to project the iPhone screen onto a wall.
It takes very little to make this happen. All you need is a box of Nikes, some spare Lego parts for mounting and fixing the iPhone and a cheapo magnifiying glass as the projectors’ lens.[Read More…]
If you’re an avid Strobist, you know that the Strobist community is all about off-camera flash. In fact your submitted images can be removed from the pool if you use an on camera flash (there are exceptions to anything, of course, but as a general thumb rule this is how it goes).
The only exception allowed is “FWIW, on-camera flash is fine if it is used to trigger other off-camera flashes”, I assume that this exception was set in place for those who can not afford wireless triggers or only have one slave flash with an optical sensor.
This thing is that triggering a slave with an on board flash may impact the lighting of an image. even if you set the master to its lowest output three is some light coming from that flash.
Now, it is it fill you are after, this may actually be a conscious decision, but if you want no flash at all coming from on camera, there is a simple hack to make only optical sensors magically see the master’s light burst. I call it The Dark Master. buehahahahahahHAHAHAHA![Read More…]
A few weeks back we shared a tutorial on how to convert your old film camera into a background projector (AKA Cookie Projector). Seems like this project grabbed a lot of attention, with one comment that kept coming back over and over: “Why Kill The Poor Camera?“
Even a reference from Strobist seems to hint that if one goes through the agonizing process of un-hinging the back of a camera, they should “use it for good“.
Of course the initial intent was to use a camera that is unserviceable (as RC Hill did with the project we featured), yet, there had to be another way, a way that does not involve un-hinging or pliering the back of a camera. And indeed there is. (or actually Are, as there are two solutions found).*
(* no cameras were heart while making this post)[Read More…]
When we photograph something very small we call it a macro photography. I would imagine we should call it Micro photography, but I don’t have control over the jargon.
Shooting small things poses great challenges and comes with high rewards. In this tutorial I to get all the info that you’d need to take macro shots. starting from equipment through subjects and tip and wrap up of some of my favorite macro photographers on Flickr if you need some extra inspiration.
When we talk about macro photography we tend to think about small things that we shoot from a close distance. This definition works for me as an on-the-nose definition and is probably right for just about 95% of all macro images.[Read More…]
An Amamorfic Camera provides a clever method of using the 35mm film to capture non standard aspect ratio photographs.
The short version is that the pinhole on that camera is not perpendicular to the film for the long version [OpenGeekWindow] You know this problem all to well from digital point and shoots. The aspect ratio on a regular point&shoot is 3:4 and the standard for printing pictures is 2:3, so you have to ask your printer (hey, anyone here still prints?) to leave white stripes at the edges of the picture.[Read More…]
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