Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
With lenses getting more and more expensive, here is a nice trick for getting wonderful photos with an f/1.8 140mm lens for less than 100$.
Austria based photographer Attila Fricz of mflenses hacked together an old KO 140mm f1.8 projector lens to a Sony NEX-7 and the results are a delight.
Yup, you heard right, true TTL on a (1959) Canon P Rangefinder. TTL stands for Through The Lens, which would be kinda impossible for that manual-focus, manual-exposure camera. Yet, Kevin Kadooka (who also made the beautiful LUX TLR) managed to build one using some 3D printed parts and a Trinket Pro 3V microcontroller.
National Geographic is known for capturing unbelievable photographs. For some of their stories they have cameras diving into the deep oceans, hand on trees, or left behind for weeks to capture a rare mating in a desolated jungle.
While Nat Geo also uses stock Nikon Cameras, they do modify them sometimes in what could only be dubbed the heavens of camera hackery labs. The lab, led by Kenji Yamaguchi – Nat Geo Chief Maker, converts cameras, lenses and strobes for specific needs. Nat Geo’s Proof did a full story and video on Kenji, giving a glimpse into the wonderful world of Nat Geo’s camera hackery.
“Until the 20th century, “reality” was everything humans could touch, smell, see and hear. Since the initial publication of the chartered electromagnetic spectrum… humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see and hear is less than one millionth of reality.” Foreword by Niles Davis.
Here at Destruction Of Cats Technologies, we bring you cutting edge innovations at the forefront of the photographic revFURlution with the aid of duct tape, cardboard and other salvageable treasures found in neglected trashcans in deserted alleyways.
3 years ago, in the alleyways of Bondi Beach, Stevender hacked into his camera against the wishes of his friends, family and ancestors to reveal a hidden spectrum invisible to mere mortals: Infrared.
The clever folks over at JCAP Media have found a way to turn your old TI-84 graphing calculator that’s been sitting in the bottom of your desk drawer since college into something you may actually use. Who knew the graphing calculator could double as an intervalometer just by inputting a few commands and attaching it to your DSLR? This little hack is super easy and could actually come in handy when you’re shooting your next timelapse. Check it out!
GoPro has some cool time lapse features, but they are somewhat restricted, especially the interval between shots parameter which is limited to 60 seconds. If the camera is close to a computer though, you can get total control over the camera by issuing simple HTTP requests.
Adrian Sitterle shares a complete list of HTTP GoPro commands as well as a simple script that uses them to take a timelapse with a 30 minutes interval.
Those commands control everything from waking the up the camera; through
it is not often that a person builds their own camera, and even less common for them to build a large format camera, but Jimmy.c. Alzen just built one of those. The total cost of the build was less than $150 + several years of education and tinkering know-how.
The camera was submitted to Hack a day’s Challenge and as such it is pretty hacked up. The photographs that it takes, though, are dreamy. [Read More…]
Photographer Eivind Rohne is a happy Fuji X1 shooter, but ever the greatest of cameras can use a small push to make it perfect.
Eivind shares that one of the most used functions on his Fuji X1 is the back panel direction buttons which he uses to move the focus point. He does that by assigning the front custom button to activate focus point selection.
While was almost perfect, Eivind made it even more perfect by adding a bit of Sugru to the camera:
When I shoot, I move the focus point around a lot. So on the X-T1 I’ve assigned the function to activate focus point selection to the front custom button. Then I can press it with my middle finger, and move the focus point with my thumb on the four buttons around the OK button. But I want to do this without having to take the camera from my eye to see which button I’m pressing.
So to work more efficiently with the camera, I rolled thin stripes of Sugru and applied to all four buttons around the OK button. I also put a small dot of Sugru on the front function button, the Focus Assist button, and on the AF-L button. Why not the AE-L button you might wonder? Because with only a dot on one of those two, I immediately know where on the back of the camera my finger is without having to look. And I chose red because it looked color than black.
We have seen some major cameras get hacked and it usually makes them better. Magic Lantern made Canon better, Nikon Hacker added functions to Nikon, and Ptool added video Codex for Panasonic. Now it is the time for Samsung camera to get hacked.
Finally after a year and a half in the wild the NX300 got rooted. Getting rooted means gaining administrative rights to the camera and practically running any program on it.
Developer Georg Lukas went ahead and played with his new NX300, but he did not play with it like a photographer would, he played with it like an IT consultant would exposing the camera security weaknesses (of which he found quite a few).
[Read More…]
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!