Sunday, February 1, 2009

DIY Beauty Dish Enhances Your Portraits

8:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Beauty dishes are great flash modifiers for portrait photographs, but even a cheap model will set you back at least $100. Skip it—a surprisingly effective DIY beauty dish costs less than $20. The F-Stops Here photography blog posts a project by David Tejada that combines a plastic salad bowl, en empty CD spindle, a plastic downspout attachment for a gutter, and a $3 convex mirror from an automotive store. The result is a thrifty beauty dish with incredibly polished looks. While he built his specifically for his Nikon SB-800 flash, his design would work well with any large flash and can be easily modified for smaller rigs. If you build the dish and want more flexibility with flash placement, research how to extend your flash cord using Ethernet to give yourself more creative room. DIY Beauty Dish [The F-Stops Here] More »

Adopt A Word To Save It From Extinction

7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Save the Words is a website dedicated to keeping underused English language words in the dictionary. Pick an underused word and pledge to save it from extinction. Lexicographers analyse the frequency of word usage in popular culture and media to decide which new words will go into the dictionary, but they also track the falling popularity of words and opt to remove them. At Save the Words, an initiative of the Oxford English Dictionary, you can browse a wall of rare words, be given a random word, or search for a word to see if it’s in danger of extinction. Once you find a word to your liking, you can pledge to use that word in common usage as often as you can: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the best of my ability.” Thanks to Save the Words I finally have a proper adjective for a co-worker I had named Shrub Head: frutescent. Need to find companion words for your new vocabulary buddy? Check out our compendium of the best online language tools for word nerds. Save the Words [via Digital Inspiration] More »

Build A Papercraft Cubee

6:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Cubeecraft has dozens of Cubees, or block-shaped characters made from folded paper, modeled after pop culture icons as old as the 1960s-era Batman, and as recent as President Barack Obama. Armed with a printer, some paper (the heavier the better), and one of the many templates at Cubeecraft, you can fold icons from nearly any genre. Politics, obscure cartoons, comic book characters, television stars and more have all been carefully modeled in cubic 3D glory. Finally you’ll be able to craft that diorama depicting how the rebels could have held the ice planet Hoth—if only they’d enlisted Earthworm Jim. The templates are all in .JPG format, which lends itself to easy tinkering in Photoshop if you’re up for it—I turned the Cubee of Dwight from The Office into my boss, for example, with a quick face transplant. Cubeecraft [via Glimmer] More »

Recycle Cardboard Boxes Into A Durable Cat Scratching Pad

1:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Craft a supremely cheap and furniture-saving scratch-pad for your feline friends with this tutorial from the Design Sponge blog. It’s free and friendly to both the environment and adorable kitties. The post author, like many cat owners, noticed after a few purchases that store-bought scratch pads are little more than stacked corrugated cardboard, flipped sideways for clawing. Since most of us probably have a few thick-sided cardboard boxes to spare, or can easily acquire a few, there’s hardly any effort to making a cheaper subsitute. Once you’ve got your boxes, all you need to do is carefully cut them to be the same width, then wind the strips around each other. With a little masking tape to hold it all together—and a dash of catnip if you have it handy—your cat will be shredding the cardboard instead your favourite chair (hopefully). If you already have the scratching post side of things taken care of, you could always build a kitty chaise lounge. DIY Project: Recycled Cardboard Kitty Pad [Design Sponge] More »