camera hacks

DIY Cameraphone Zoom And Lighting Lens

6:30AM Whitson Gordon | If the iPhone’s zoom just isn’t doing it for you, and you prefer a higher-quality optical zoom to lesser digital zoom apps, DIY website Instructables details how to make a contraption that’ll help you achieve just the frame you’re looking for. More »

Turn A DVD Lens Into A Mobile Phone Macro Lens

3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Enjoy macro photography and wish you could snap macro pictures more often? If you have an old DVD player or drive laying around, you can recycle parts from it to make a tiny macro lens. More »

DIY Steadicam Provides Scorcese-Like Smoothness For $10

1:20AM Kevin Purdy | Your home videos are probably shaky enough when you’re standing still. What if you wanted to track some moving subjects, but don’t want to make viewers seasick? DIYer YB2Normal demonstrates a homemade video stabiliser that runs about $US10 to build. More »

Turn A Wireless Doorbell Into A Remote Camera Trigger

9:00PM Kevin Purdy | We’ve highlighted DIY remote camera shutter triggers in the past, tearing apart headphones, computer mice and bags full of hardware to make wired triggers. Tear open a wireless doorbell, though, and you get actual wireless triggering without too much fuss. More »

Build A $14 Video Camera Stabiliser

1:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Professional video stabilisers are prohibitively expensive. You won’t get $10,000 worth of stabilisation out of a $US14 DIY model, but you will get radically smoother video for a tiny fraction of the price. More »

Squeeze A Few More Shots Out Of A Dying Camera Battery

3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Despite the best preparation, sometimes you find yourself dangerously low on battery life with a full day’s activities ahead of you. Get those last shots with these battery-conserving tips. More »

Build A Panoramic Tripod Head For $10

1:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Despite the excellent software solutions for stitching panoramic pictures together, there is no substitute for taking clean and well-aligned pictures from the start. Create great panoramas with an inexpensive DIY-tripod head. Over at the photo-editing site Worth1000, user Arodrix has put together a detailed tutorial on making your own panoramic mount. A panoramic camera-mount can set you back hundreds of dollars. If you’re not planning on paying the bills with your epic panoramic-shots of famed world locales, you’ll be better served making your own mount for $10 in parts. While the end product doesn’t have the polished look of a $300 mount it does provide the proper alignment necessary for a nice clean panorama. Below is the sample from his tutorial made with the mount—it required extremely minimal post-processing work to stitch neatly together: More »

Extend Your Flash Cord With Network Cable

7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Don’t spend money on pricey flash extension cords, you can make a cheap and effective extension using CAT5 cable. Over at DIYPhotography.net, Udi found that his TTL—through the lens—Nikon flash extension-cable was a bit too short. He didn’t want to shell out even more money for an only slightly longer cord, so he bit the bullet and sacrificed the cable he had to his experiment. I cut the TTL cable in half, stripped back the rubber shielding and I used 2 Cat5e network wall jacks, 1 for each end. Cat5e cabling and jacks consist of 8 wires, so it was a perfect match for this. The other aspect of those cables is that they are shielded – after all, they transfer high amounts of traffic. His gamble with the cable paid off, network cable was the perfect match to create an extension. He tested it with both 5ft and 50ft lengths of CAT5 cable with no apparent delays in the flash triggering. Given the small fortune he would have spent on a propriety extension cord of that length—if he could even find one 50ft long!—he saved a bundle with his cable modification. If you have ingenious money-saving camera hacks of your own, share the wealth in the comments below.Photo by pieterjanviaene. Extending Your TTL Flash Cord [DIYPhotography.net] More »