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This is a video that was posted to YouTube a while ago but doesn’t seem to have seen much traffic. It was posted by the channel Handy Bear (aka, Michel), and unlike most camera slider motorisation conversions these days, there’s not a 3D printer in sight!
The Slider shown in the video is just a cheap one Michel found online. It looks like many inexpensive sliders, and these are often the best candidates for a motor conversion. An Arduino Nano controls the electronics.
At some point, many of us will have a camera that just doesn’t feel right when it comes to shutter speeds. Maybe we’re seeing flicker when we’re shooting timelapse, or perhaps we have an old camera that doesn’t seem as quick anymore.
In the olden days, confirming shutter speeds was no easy feat. It required some specialised hardware and a book of charts to compare. These days, you can do it with an Arduino and a couple of lasers. This project by Stuart Brown shows you how.
Digital camera sensors have come a very long way in the last few decades. Even just in the last 20 years, we’ve gone from the likes of the 4.1-Megapixel Nikon D2h to 100-megapixel monsters from Fuji, Hasselblad and Phase One. Hell, even smartphone camera sensors now boast 200-megapixel resolutions with a lot of neat digital wizardry. But as complex as processors have become, they’re very simple at their core.
This one, proudly proclaimed by its creator to be “the worst digital camera of all time ever”, shows that basic principle off extremely well. It was created by Peter Sanchez at Electromechanical Productions. It features an 8×6 grid of light-dependent resistors (LDRs) for a grand total of 48 pixels of resolution.
Anybody who’s ever had to sit (or stand) and do a spoken piece to camera will know the struggle of trying to learn and memorise a script. Even if we think we’ve got it nailed down pretty well, we’ll often find ourselves doing two or three (or twelve) takes for some lines that just don’t seem to come out right, especially if they’re pretty long ones. This is where teleprompters step in and this one’s pretty awesome.
Designed by Modern Hobbyist (MH), this is the second iteration of his teleprompter design and features a built-in Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 3.5″ touchscreen so you don’t need to mess around trying to slot your phone into it each time you need it and thanks to running a Linux web server you get external button control thanks to an Arduino Pro Micro pretending to be a standard USB keyboard.
Shooting multi-frame panorama photographs can be fun, and the resulting images can be striking. But once you get past a panorama that is, say, four or five frames wide, it becomes difficult to do without a tripod. And if you want a panorama that is more than one frame in height, then hand-held is nigh impossible.
There are manual panorama heads you can mount on your tripod, but using one can become a bit tedious, especially shooting a dozen or so frames. They become more onerous when you want a pano that is several rows high.
The only thing cooler than a 6-axis motion control rig is a DIY 6-axis motion control rig. And the only thing cooler than that is an open-source one that anybody can build and modify to suit their own needs. And that’s exactly what this is from Chris Desrondiers at Do It Whenever? An open-source 6-axis motion control rig that’s made entirely from 3D printed and off-the-shelf parts.
Getting started with Arduino Nano and Python is easy thanks to extensive online documentation and an increasing DIY culture.
Waiting whilst flatbed scanners scan a colour negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent colour precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two. Tools available today, such as Negative Lab Pro, make it easy to achieve great colour negative conversions. So fastening the scanning process using a camera makes more sense than ever before. However, the software to automate this process so far did not exist. Until today!
Digital cameras have become so high resolution these days that you might wonder why somebody would want to build one of their own from scratch with a resolution that’s not even a fraction of what digital cameras could do a decade ago. But some things just need to be done because they’re fun.
YouTuber Sean Hodgins has been working on this idea for a long time, and now he’s finally made and released a 1-kilopixel DIY camera. He’s also released the files as Open Source so you can download and make your own, too.
The Flying Pixel Portrait Camera uses a video beamer, a single photoresistor, an Arduino and a PC for taking photos of people’s faces. The beamer ‘scans’ the image by projecting a small white square onto a person’s face inside an otherwise completely dark chamber. While the projected square slowly moves over the entire face, the photoresistor captures the reflected luminosities.
This generates a proportional analog electric signal which is digitized by an Arduino and transmitted to the PC. As the PC also controls the position of the projected square, it can now construct an image based on the different brightness values that it receives, one pixel at a time.
My Students came up with an idea to drop flowers into a pan of milk after they saw several pictures on Instagram. The students decided to create a technique for getting the perfect picture by eliminating all trial and error. The students created the following technique and were able to photograph over 70 photos, successfully capturing the splash every time.
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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