Make: Online: Photography Archives

Archive: Photography

February 3, 2010

"Photo grandpa" builds mother of all homebrew laser triggers

A reader who saw Marc's recent post about an Arduino-controlled laser photo trigger wrote in to tell us about the amazing work of Belgian photographer and Flickr user fotoopa (which, we hear, as "foto opa," means something like "photo grandpa" in Dutch). That's him in the picture above, with the awesome homebrew laser-triggered camera rig that he uses to capture amazing pictures of insects in flight and splashing drops of colored water. I'm generally skeptical of film purists, but fotoopa makes the compelling claim that no digital camera has the shutter speed necessary to do this kind of imagery. He claims the Compur #1 shutter used in his 2008 setup has a speed of less than 5 milliseconds. Technical details about his 2009 setup are available here. [Thanks, Wilco Schillemans!]

Arduino powered laser trigger for your camera

You can make a camera trigger without a micro controller, but this system allows you to easily add sensors or variable timers, making it extremely flexible. [Thanks Haje]

There are loads of reasons for why you could want to trigger your camera remotely - to avoid camera shake, for example, or to be able to take a photograph of yourself without having to rely on a timer. If you want to build more ambitious projects, however, you may have to consider getting more exotic.

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Family
Make: Arduino

January 29, 2010

Panning time lapse using a kitchen timer

From the MAKE Flickr pool:

Flickr user rtadlock made this stylish panning timelapse camera using an old kitchen timer, and it came out beautifully!

If you need inspiration on how to make your own, check out the Time-lapse panning article in MAKE, Volume 15, page 159. Happy snapping!

January 27, 2010

Flashback: Infrared photography

MAKE Volume 12 hit newsstands in November of 2007 and featured a special themed section called Upload, focused on digital arts and crafts. Richard Kadrey offered this cool little tutorial on getting started with infrared photography. Enjoy! You can also still pick up a back issue of MAKE Volume 12 over in the Maker Shed.

Looking at the Low End
Infrared photography reveals a world invisible to the naked eye.
By Richard Kadrey

For the human eye, the lowest visible wavelengths are red light measuring about 700 nanometers (nm). Below that, infrared radiation runs from about 750nm down to 1mm. When photographed in this part of the spectrum, leaves and grass glow with energy, as if the entire natural world is lined with fiber optics. Skin is luminous and perfect, like alabaster. Infrared photography gives you an inhuman view of the world, and it's a beautiful one.

In the beginning, infrared photography was nothing you needed to know about. It was a high-tech procedure reserved for laboratories and mapping satellites. Even when artists got their hands on the stuff, it required special film that had to be kept in an ice chest until it was used, and special processing that required access to a darkroom with the right chemicals, and all the expenses those items entailed.

Digital photography has made infrared accessible to everyone. That's great news to those using IR for the first time, because this is when you're liable to make the most mistakes. Better yet, you don't need an expensive camera to take great shots. In fact, cheaper and so-called "dinosaur" digital cameras can be the best ones for IR shooting. The reason is simple: most high-end cameras come with a built-in infrared-blocking filter (sometimes called "hot glass") that sits right in front of the camera's sensor chip. Cheap cameras don't always have this IR filter, and they're easy to hack if they do. But remember when picking your cheap camera to make sure it has a Preview mode. This will allow you to see your infrared shot and make adjustments on the fly.

Movie: Manufactured Landscapes

While we're on the subject of great Maker-movies, I feel obliged to mention Jennifer Baichwal's documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which is a survey of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose métier is finding beauty in the midst of environments radically altered by human activity. If you watch no further than the first shot, you will have seen one of the most amazing takes I've ever seen in any movie, ever: It's an eight minute tracking shot of a Chinese factory floor that just goes on and on and on, and you keep thinking "This place can't be that big; this shot has to end soon." And it doesn't. And the images of the ship-breaking beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, are like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game: Beautiful and frightening.

January 25, 2010

Amazing model landscape photography

This is not, in fact, an actual volcano. It is, rather, the work of Matthew Albanese, a photographer who builds meticulously detailed landscape models and then lights and shoots them to achieve amazing realism. You can view more of his work here. My personal favorite is the Martian landscape made from paprika and charcoal. [via Neatorama]

January 14, 2010

Photographing snowflakes

A few years ago I picked up Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes, thinking any self-proclaimed snow junkie like myself should own it. A renowned snow scientist and physicist, Libbrecht's great little book taught me about snowflake fundamentals and helped me identify different types of flakes and learn what each shape tells us about the weather. Then my friend Katie got me Libbrecht's The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album, a stunning coffee table book filled with snowflake photographs (like the one above) Libbrecht has taken using his snow photography rig. Recently I stumbled across his site, which details each component of his photo-microscope rig, including cost (although this part is a bit dated), perfect for trying to come up with the setup for cheaper. Check it out if you have any interest in snowflakes or micro-photography.

January 4, 2010

DIY beauty dish

Australian Flickr user Andrew converted a regular flash into a beauty dish by adding a 7" stainless steel dish, a lid from a food tin, a "4n20 Pies giveaway stubby holder" and some pieces of Mechano.

Here's an example of the effects he got with his dish.

December 30, 2009

DIY steadicam, version five

Back in July, I blogged about YB2Normal's inexpensive PVC gimbal for a home-made steadicam rig. Since that time, William has been steadily refining his design. Version five, pictured above, features a redesigned gimbal incorporating an off-the-shelf auto part. [via Hack A Day]

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

December 23, 2009

Making animations with light painting

Thought making still pictures using light drawing was tough? Check out this impressive animated video for the song Lucky by All India Radio, made by Dee Pee Studios. This technique looks like a ton of fun to try, and unlike traditional video, you don't need special equipment for great results- just a digital camera that can be set to manual exposure mode, and an ample amount of patience. Might be a fun thing to try out over the holidays! [via neatorama]

More:

December 22, 2009

Camera blast shield takes a beating

From the MAKE Flickr Pool

Vinmarshall posted this pic of his "bomb-proof" camera blast shield - and despite some limited flammability, the tough enclosure seems to live up to its name -

Check out the full how-to on PopSci.

December 21, 2009

If Tesla had a Christmas tree

Prepare you house for a visit from Jolly old St. Nikola with this Tesla Christmas Tree, by artist Peter Terren. I wonder what kind of presents he will leave? [via neatorama]

December 19, 2009

How-To: Build your own panoramic film camera

Over at Fun Science Gallery, this English translation of a 2002 article by Giorgio Carboni describing, in great detail, the construction of a beautiful homemade rotating-objective panoramic film camera. It's made of brass and plastic stock. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]

December 18, 2009

Futurepicture, a homebrew light field camera

Ever take a photograph, and realize after the fact that you focused on a tree in the background instead of your subject's face? Wish you could go back and fix it? Well, unfortunately you can't if you used a regular camera, however if you had a plenoptic camera it would be no problem. Instead of capturing a flat, 2D array of pixels, a plenoptic camera uses an array of microlenses to capture 4D lightfield data. This data can then be processed to create a final image that is focused on any part of the scene.

Daniel Reetz and Matti Kariluoma wanted to experiment with light field photography, but you can't really buy one of these cameras, so they built one themselves. Instead of using a single camera and microles array, however, they decided to use rapid prototyping equipment and a bunch of point&shoot Canon cameras loaded with the SDM firmware, and the result is the Large Light Field Camera Array. Plans aren't available yet, however they are pledging to release the whole thing as an open source/hardware project. Looks great, guys! [via teamdroid]

December 17, 2009

How-To: Build your own field camera

British camera restorer Rayment Kirby has a cool tutorial on how (and why) to make your own antique-style field camera from wood and brass. Mr. Kirby seems to follow the convention that the "Field" of "field camera" is an eponym and should be capitalized, whereas the Wikipedia article does not. Can anyone clarify? Was there a "Mr. Field?" Or a "Mrs. Field?" (Please, no cookie jokes.) [Thanks, Billy!]

December 16, 2009

Homemade camera body

Howard Boys made this awesome steampunk-y camera body from soldered brass. The lens and shutter were purchased components. [Thanks, Billy!]

158-lens camera

Built by Associate Professor Yojiro Ishino of the Nagoya Institute of Technology, this giant camera took six months to build and has reportedly been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the camera with the record-holding highest number of lenses. It's about 3 inches high and 18.5 inches across, and was built to study flames by capturing them simultaneously from ~~as many angles as possible~~ a large number of angles. [via Neatorama]

December 14, 2009

Cold cathode light painting

Using a cold cathode tube artist Dana Maltby paints colorful, surreal images full of undulating trails and kaleidoscopic detail. Learn to build your own cold cathode setup with this quick tutorial. [via diyphotography]