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.

Engineer Guy on Fiber Optics

In this, the last installment of the third series of Bill Hammackโ€™s wildly popular Engineer Guy videos, Bill exposes the wonders of fiber optics. He starts by demonstrating transmission of laser light through a fiber optic stereo cable, then explains total internal reflection with a really cool visual aid made from a bucket of antifreeze. There are details on the manufacture of the fibers themselves, the design of the first transatlantic fiber optic cable, and the signal processing used to encode data for transmission via fiber. All that, and more, in just five minutes and thirty seconds. Nice way to wound out series #3, Bill!

Ultra Simple 360-degree Photo Hack

Ultra Simple 360-degree Photo Hack

Photographing a spherical reflector and post-processing the image to produce a one-shot panorama is not a new idea; what’s really cool about Ryan Burnside’s recent project is is how simple he’s made the process. Besides the obligatory digital camera and computer, Ryan’s method requires just two essentially free tools: 1) a mirrored Xmas ball, and 2) the GIMP open-source image manipulation program:

How-To: Cinemagraphs

How-To: Cinemagraphs

While animated GIFs have been around for a while, they’ve recently been adopted by photographers to add small amounts of looping motion to otherwise still images. It’s no wonder they’ve been seen all over the web lately, as the result is often a quite entrancing moving photograph. If you’re interested in making your own, Photojojo […]