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.
This discussion board is in French, but it’s still fascinating and rewarding enough to scroll through the postings to see the progress pics of this scratch-built SLR camera. Really inspiring. [Thanks, Jacek Tomasiak!] SLR From Scratch
Finnish photographer Ollipekka Kangas tapes pinhole cameras to trees and sign poles for months at a time, accumulating some pretty crazy imagery. Basically solarigraphic camera is a pinhole camera, very slow one. These pinhole photographs taken with a lensless pinhole camera with a extra long exposure. I use black&white paper which is 5-10 ASA. Exposure […]
Instructables user ~teknoarsonist~ created this DSLR wrist strap useful for “pulling one-handers” without fear of dropping your precious, but heavy, camera.
Becky spotted this “kodachrome curtain” from Flickr user yarnzombie in her weekly CRAFT Flickr pool round-up post. Besides the coolness of the idea itself, this is a great example of the power of a good photograph to sell your project. Gorgeous shot!
We’ve had many a discussion in our CRAFT offices with our photographer Sam Murphy about how hard it is to photograph food. For you budding food bloggers, take a visit to Chow.com’s slideshow 10 ways to photograph food for more inspiration. I like the approach used by Jamie Olivier pictured above where it’s real food […]
Recently, I came across photographer Michael Paul Smith, who has an online showcase of his miniature scene photographs.
I asked him to tell of his process, influences and techniques.
I first start off with some very rough sketches on the particular building I’m thinking of making. Really, they are mere scribbles, but they capture the key points of the structure. I have to ask myself questions like: when was this building built and in what style of architecture. Has this building been added to over the years and if so, in what way.
If you walk down the center of town, and really study the buildings, you can see their history.
For what I’m doing, my structures have to be generic enough so they don’t look too unusual, yet they have to have some character to them to make them interesting.
I also study photographs from the past. There are books out entitled Then and Now, which show photographs of buildings taken in the 1890’s and also in the present at the exact same spot. These are very telling because you can see how drastically or subtly things have changed. I want my models to have the feeling that they have traveled in time.
This week’s Flashback, from the pages of MAKE Volume 15, shows how authors Jim Moir and Ken Lange devised a camera setup to auto-trigger photos of the critters who came to visit their backyards in the dead of night. Judging from the multitude of pictures they’ve gathered over the years, there is no shortage of […]
