Gvido Mūrnieks Archives

DIY large format scrap camera

Sep 6, 2016 by Gvido Mūrnieks 10 Comments

The idea of this camera started with vintage Profile Spotlight, that I wanted to restore, but found out, that some of internal lens elements were shattered. The only lens element, that was undamaged was the front element of it. Upon some closer inspection I discovered, that this element can project image circle big enough, to cover 8X10 area.

The obvious use of it was to create large format camera. but I didn’t want to bother with large format film and other hassles of creating proper large format camera, just for this weekend experiment. So, I decided to create something like Camera Obscura and photograph projected image with DSLR.

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Building An Ultra Violet Flash For Black Light Photography

Aug 31, 2015 by Gvido Mūrnieks 21 Comments

Back in May I got collaboration offer, from a body painter, to make photo session with airbrushed models. This offer gave me the incentive, to finally try out blacklight photography, what I wanted to try out for years now.
After searching through web, I found, that blacklight photography is technically rather complicated process. The main obstacle of blacklight photography is the light source. Generally, there are two main options, for UV lighting. Ultra violet constant lighting and ultra violet strobe lighting:

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How To Build A Mega 84cm, 480 LEDs Ring Light For $35

Aug 15, 2015 by Udi Tirosh 17 Comments

Here is a smart ring light fitted for the LED era. I mean we shared a huge kick a$$ ring light build before, but this one is powered by LEDs rather than CFLs and it is just as huge and just as awesome.

This huge contraption was invented by Gvido Mūrnieks who also made a DIY Light Blaster and who I now consider a master woodman/tinkerer/maker kind of guy.

The build starts with a huge piece of plywood which you can get (along with some aluminum angles) from the scraps section of your local DIY store or carpentry.

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How To Build A DIY device similar to the Light Blaster™

Aug 14, 2015 by Gvido Mūrnieks 26 Comments

Having seen the Light Blaster image projector, I wanted to know if I could build myself. Kinda out of pure curiosity. I wanted to know, is building a Light Blaster would be a task I can handle.

The main idea was to mimic the Light Blaster functionality and create a slide projector that could project 35mm slides with strobe and an old lens.

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