Photography Gear News

Have you ever held an old TLR (Twin Lens Reflex)? It feels amazingly good. The top viewfinder is a delight and shooting from the hip removes any obstacles between you and your model. Well, a nice Rolleiflex TLR can set you back about 5 D800s.

"Derek Mellott is no stranger to Timelapse sliders and dollies, he is a genius. In fact our most popular slider design on the blog is Derek's design. Today, Derek explains how to DIY the Slidetracked, a fully featured, easily assembled, 3D printed DIY dolly. If you just want the features, but do not want to build one, you can get a pre-assembeled one from Indiegogo too."

"It is not often that I see a picture and get my eye wet with nostalgia. However this one from David Sittig hit a soft spot for me..."

"One of the best ways to make interesting light painting is to get a piece of steel wool on a string and spin it around on a long exposure (see tutorial here).

While we always warn folks to be cautious and wear goggles and long sleeves while spinning a piece of burning metal we never actually talked about camera safety."

"I've seen some crazy setups for high speed photography utilizing all sorts of weird parts. There is even a system that will turn the lights off for you, if you so please. But, this is the first time I am seeing such a huge overkill in term of components used to gain some control over the circuit."

"I guess that snoots are one of those things that you can make out of almost any substance. As a kid, I used to listed to Dennis Leary and he had a similar notion on bongs (you can listed to this very NSFW, rude and strong languaged track here)."

"The Blinky is a self-assemble DIY Pinhole lens made from cardboard. Similarly to the Paper Fold Pinhole, the film chamber is kept shut with a rubber band. (Did I say this kit is genius yet?) and the film is wound with a wooden peg."

On the previous post we build all the circuitry needed for complete control over high speed setups and today we will put it to the test. We will recreate one of the images previously done on DIYP (and has been in the title for this series).

A few weeks ago the blog has taken a small detour to the baking realm with camera shaped cookies. I thought that cookies were not big enough in some cases so here we go with a guide to bake a Nikon cake.

"If you are not familiar with photograms and cyanotypes, here are two new words for you: A Photogram is a photograph made without a camera by placing objects directly onto a photographic paper. A Cyanotype is the developing process used to make blue prints."

"Photographer Matus Zosak was inspired by the 35mm panoramic pinhole camera tutorial we featured way back so he built one of his own. His pinhole, however, came to life using stop motion animation. It is right after the jump.

Actually, Zosak also documented the build process in a time-lapse which provides a window to how a paper camera like this comes to be."

"If you went to college around the same time that I did, you may have caught the last few professors that did not use power point for slides. Instead they used an ancient device called overhead projector which took letter (or A4) sized transparencies.

They were a behemoth of a device, capable of throwing an image across a huge auditorium. And a size to match. So did the heat produced and the noise from the fan. But in the hands of the skilled professor with a few markers those projectors were an efficient tool in hammering infinitesimal math into our plugged heads.

Those devices are obsolete now. Power point presentations and DLP projectors took their place. This is why hacking one into a pattern projector feels a whole lot better than killing an SLR. This is exactly what flickr user haristobald (blog) did and worked into a super heroes series. A strobe replaced the powerful lamp to throw a superhero icon on a wall, ceiling or even a person..."

"It seems that in addition to batteries and battery grips, there are also counterfeit Nikon filters. 1kindphotography has a detailed article on what you should look for to make sure your filter is genuine. Always purchase equipment from authorized Nikon dealers (the "fake" Nikon filter was bought on eBay).

Read more on NikonRumors.com: http://nikonrumors.com/2012/02/26/how-to-spot-counterfeit-nikon-filters.aspx/#ixzz1nefLkb6t"

If I recall correctly, it was Archimedes who said "Give me enough gaff tape and I will move the world".
So we are not going to move the world today, but we are going to control light with nothing more than gaffer's tape.

"Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've almost certainly heard that the ancient Maya long-count calendar rolls over in December this year. Along with spurring the release of a frenzy of apocalyptic books, this event is also helping spawn renewed tourist interest in Maya ruins. Not to miss out on the opportunity (and free publicity), Mesoamerican communities are hosting a number of special events to celebrate the historic occasion. And governments in what was once the Maya realm have funded a new wave of restoration projects at ruin sites."

"One of the downsides of using a small strobe is that you don't get the nice modeling light like the big studio guns.

That means that you have to pre-visualize your light. If you are new to strobes this may not be trivial even on a bare strobe, but throw some modifiers in (e.g. a softbox or an umbrella) and it get even harder. This is why a modeling light is can be your best friend as you make your first steps into the modifiers world. In this tutorial I will explain how you can add a modeling light to a strobe using a DIY Double Flash Bracket, but any double flash bracket will do."

"There really is no explanation of electronics without a scheme, so we placed a scheme below. While it does not go in depth about each of the parts it explains in a nut shell what's its name and what it does. The magic of it, of course, is that you can create quite an effective burst of light, from a few 1.5V AA batteries."

I just love it when people use ordinary stuff to create new gear. Take a Yoyo for example. It's built to roll and collect wire, reminds you of something? It reminded Marc Cocchio a basic slider. And indeed a slider was build from a yoyo.

"If you are doing any videography, a jib (or a crane) is probably the third piece of gear you will buy (after a camera and a slider)...."

"On our last post we went through the basic ideas of capturing a high speed photograph, and today we will cover some of the basic triggers and kits available to play the high speed game."