Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
3D printed cameras are a lot of fun, and something I was planning to make a bunch of this year before we were told we weren’t allowed to go out and play. But despite most of us not being able to get out to shoot our cameras right now, it hasn’t stopped people developing new ones.
You might remember Dora Goodman, creator of the Goodman One 3D printed medium format camera. Well, now she’s back with the Scura, a new open-source 3D printed curved panoramic pinhole camera.
Fragment 8 Retro Camera brings together the Super 8’s look and feel with modern-day technology and social media. This strange little gadget is inspired by Super 8 cameras but lets you directly shoot GIF and share it on your social media immediately.
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.
So, you have decided to upgrade your camera. This is a big decision, but is it really necessary? I know you want a new camera, but do you really need it? In this video, Maarten Heilbron will give you some fantastic tips to help you decide whether you really need a new piece of gear. Ad if you do – how you should choose it.
I stumbled upon a wonderful quote about creativity when I was reading a book about waiting. “The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.” – Orson Welles. I instantly related to this quote and how it affected my photography through analysis paralysis.
We live in a time of wonderful abundance. An era where if you have the means you can own almost anything. We live in a time where people keep creating things to make our lives easier, faster and more instant. With this abundance of choice our first obstacle isn’t starting something but rather how should we proceed.
You have seen (and maybe even ordered) a tiny LEGO Leica. It doesn’t take photos, but what if I told you that you can turn your working Sony mirrorless into a LEGO camera? Well, you won’t exactly use the tiny bricks, but this skin cover that makes your camera look like it was made out of LEGO.
Cameras need lenses to work, right? Electrical and computer engineers at the University of Utah have developed a camera that doesn’t need a lens. Instead, just like you or me, it sees the world through a window. And this technology could have lots of different applications in the future.
I’m not even 18 years old and I’m so far away from my parents. It’s the first time that I’ve gone this far. I’m two-thousand kilometres away from home, in Barcelona. I’m wandering the streets with a couple of friends, unable to concentrate on them and our conversation because I’m completely enchanted by everything I see. It feels like this huge, beautiful city is hugging me, while I smile at everyone and everything: people, buildings, trees, and cars. Everything looks so much better than it does back home. Everything seems idyllic, seems just right.
I have recently acquired my first digital camera. And when I manage to snap out of the delirium, I take photos of pretty much everything – because everything seems worth capturing, everything seems freakin’ amazing!
There is something all-newcomer photographers tend to do, they either dream of camera gear or buy a lot of it. When I started in photography I went through the same thing. I thought that I needed all the lenses that my idols used, I believed I needed the biggest megapixel camera, with all the film features just in case a potential client wanted video. But over time with age came wisdom.
The amateur compensates with the many, where the master relies on the few. One camera, one lens, one light, focusing on the moment. Capturing what matters instead of focusing on the gear, giving attention to the photograph being framed.
Camera+ is one of my favourite iOS apps. It’s almost certainly the one I’ve used the most during the time that I owned iPhones. Whenever I got a new one, it was the first thing I’d install to replace the stock camera app that comes with iOS. It offers a level of control that the native app just can’t (or at least, doesn’t) offer while still offering “easy mode” options for when you want a quick snap.
Launched almost 8 years ago, it’s become one of the most popular 3rd party camera apps out there for iOS. Now they’ve launched a completely new and overhauled Camera+ 2. It’s been “reimagined and rewritten from the ground up” to help optimise efficiency and add new features. It offers improved dual camera support, built-in raw & depth editing, new sharing options and a “Smile Mode”.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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