Photography & Video

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for creating and editing digital photos and videos, as well as how to make your own still and video cameras.

iPad controlled video blimp

New York-based BREAKFAST fitted a BlimpDuino with on-board video and wireless control system and took it out for a spin at a party to interact with the crowd. Everybody’s favorite controller du jour, an iPad, was employed to orient the dirigible and act as a augmented display medium.

DIY wiggle stereoscopy

DIY wiggle stereoscopy

Andrew Odewahn of Cambridge, MA wrote this helpful tutorial for creating your own stereoscopic images. In wiggle stereoscopy, the 2 images are aligned so that the “subject” overlaps, and then the right and left images are alternated quickly. Past a certain frequency, the brain interprets the alternations as parallax motion, which creates the illusion of […]

DIY shoulder rig for DSLR video, with clever focus puller

DIY shoulder rig for DSLR video, with clever focus puller

In this video and at this site, annoyingly good-looking Swedish videographer Jonathan Bergqvist details the construction of this clever shoulder-mount device for shooting video with a DSLR. Designed by Jonathan and his father Erik, the rig itself is made out of birch and includes a manual focus puller, actuated by twisting the left handle, that is hacked together from R/C control rod parts and a hose clamp.

Google makes french fries with a potato cannon

This is just a commercial, really, but it’s pretty entertaining. Google advertisers wanted to push their whole “Chrome is fast” angle and so they set up and filmed a series of “tests” where they trigger some fast real-world event and load a page in Chrome at the same moment. Guess which process finishes first every time? Yeah, OK, that was an easy one. It’s hardly “science”–not even the watered-down television kind–but it is, in fact, fairly amusing to watch a potato get blasted through a fry-cutter and into a vat of cooking oil. They also spray paint onto a giant ear model using acoustic waves and zap a tiny pirate ship with a Tesla coil. The making-of video is recommendable, as well. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]