My old pal, Bay Area shutterbug Billy Baque, has a passion for the handmade, low-tech, all-in-one cameras-plus-darkrooms used by street photographers around the world. The so-called Cuban Polaroid is a typical example—a wooden box with a light-tight sleeve for the photographer’s arm at one end and a lens on the other. Billy describes the typical […]
Destin of Smarter Every Day took the lens off his Canon 60D, pointed a Phantom Flex high speed video camera at the shutter, and took a picture. The exposure cycle happens in four stages and lasts less than a tenth of a second in real time, but the Phantom Flex stretches that action out to […]
Simple, handy hack from Flickr user Malowz to overcome the common autofocus problem many cameras have when shooting dark subjects. The lamp mounts on his camera’s hot shoe, and spotlights the subject when the shutter button is half-pressed, giving the autofocus plenty of light to work with, and then turns the lamp off, on the full press, for the duration of the exposure.
“Bokeh” comes from the Japanese word for “blur” or “haze.” It’s used to describe the quality of the out of focus areas of a photograph. If you’ve ever read a photography forum, you’ll know that the word is often used to describe how a particular lens handles out of focus points of light. You can […]
Idahoan Dean Williams used to make a living by repairing vintage mechanical cameras. If you’ve ever pulled your hair out trying to replace a small spring that hasn’t been manufactured since the factory was bombed by Göring’s Luftwaffe, you may be interested in his well-documented DIY method. Dean’s trick for annealing them inside a wad of steel wool in a toaster oven is worth a click all by itself. His entire site, in fact, will likely be of interest to those who appreciate close mechanical work.
From a scratch built 9×12 Field Camera to an early digital camera assembled on perf board, Mats Wernersson has rightfully earned the moniker of The Camera Maker. Look past the quality build and attention to detail and you’ll notice that every camera Mats has built is a rare specimen. With interests in stereographic imaging, astronomy, panorama and plenoptic cameras, there’s little wonder why Mats takes the DIY approach.
It was a wooden box with the bellows and lens from a folding camera mounted at one end with a complete darkroom inside. Using photographic printing paper the photographer would expose a sheet of paper for the negative, develop, stop, and fix it inside the camera, then put a copy stand on the camera and photograph the negative (to obtain a positive), develop, stop, and fix, then wash the final print in a coffee can of water attached to his homemade tripod.
