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.

Beautiful element photography on Wikimedia Commons

Beautiful element photography on Wikimedia Commons

I have been reading the Picture of the Day feed from Wikimedia Commons for about a month, now, and it is fast becoming one of the best parts of my daily newsreader experience. Every day there’s a gorgeous new publicly-licensed photograph pre-selected for quality by a vote amongst Wikimedia community members.

That’s how I happened upon the work of German inorganic chemist and photographer alchemist-hp (English-language page). She or he takes amazing photographs of element, mineral, and chemical samples and has a stated goal (badly translated by yours truly) “to create special pictures of all naturally occurring elements.”

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Nature Textures Library

As a designer, I have a great love as well as a professional need for visual lexicons. Type faces, illustration, ephemera, old signage — you name it, I collect it. Textures are no different. It’s not infrequent that a texture is needed for a design project, and what better way to amass a royalty-free collection […]

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Quantum dot image sensors set to change camera industry

Quantum dot image sensors set to change camera industry

Those of you who, like me, just recently managed to score the digital camera of your dreams will be very excited to learn that it’s possibly going to be obsolete real soon. Based on technology developed by University of Toronto professor Ted Sargent, who is now CTO at start-up InVisage, the new image sensor uses a matrix of nanoparticles embedded in a polymer film which can be simply “painted” onto the top of a low-cost wafer at room temperature. If the hype is to be believed, the new sensor offers four times the sensitivity of conventional CMOS image sensors at a dramatically reduced cost per chip. [Thanks, Glen!]

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Three-roll pinhole camera

Three-roll pinhole camera

This excellent pinhole camera exposes three rolls of film simultaneously. The work of Steven Monteau of Bordeaux, France, it’s a pretty slick project, using felt-tipped pens to advance the rolls and marker tops as the knobs. Even better, Monteau provides a detailed tutorial on how to make your own. [Thanks, udi!]

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