If you have an old or broken flatbed scanner lying around and gathering dust, a neat thing you can do is convert it into a cheap, do-it-yourself lightbox for viewing negatives and slides. Photo-enthusiast James Wilson did this as a weekend project:
It was a simple process; gut the scanner, hook up a light fixture inside it, and paint the inside of the glass white. Total cost was around ten bucks for the light fixture, wiring, and paint. [#]
You can read Wilson’s writeup here. There are also some additional photos over on Flickr.
Here’s a neat idea for displaying your photos: pick up a set of blank Russian nesting dolls, saw little slits into the top, paint them, and use them as a cute set of photo holders! Check out the full tutorial here.
Francesco Capponi was inspired yesterday (AKA Easter and World Pinhole Photography Day) to create pinhole cameras out of eggs. He painted the insides with emulsion to make it light-sensitive after drilling a hole, exposed it through a pinhole, then filled the egg with processing and fixing chemicals to develop the photo. You can find a full walkthrough of his process over on Lomography. The process isn’t easy — in creating four satisfactory photos Capponi ended up destroying fifty eggs!
You’ve probably seen gigapixel photos and timelapse videos before, but how about a fusion of the two? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have a project called GigaPan Time Machine that features gigapixel time-lapse videos of things ranging from plants growing to a university carnival. They also set up a wiki describing how you can create your own time-lapse using a GigaPan Pro.
The Common Camera Project is a neat experiment started in 2009 by a group of Berkeley students led by Kevin Huynh in which hundreds of disposable cameras are being passed around the world with these simple instructions on the back of each one:
Step 1: Take a picture of something that inspires you.
Step 2: Pass the camera on to someone you trust.
Step 3: If you’re last, mail the camera back to us.
Over 300 are currently in the wild, and they have a special page tracking their progress on a map. The resulting photos will be published to the Common Cam website and possibly in a book or exhibition as well.
To capture “portraits of the sun” and to illustrate its power, General Electric filled 20 weather balloons with hydrogen and helium, surrounded them with 24 Canon DSLR cameras (18 7Ds and 6 60Ds), and shot the balloons exploding Matrix-style.
David Eger has a fun 365 day photo project called “365 Days of Clones” in which he posts a daily photo involving Star Wars clone trooper action figures. He also has a neat mini-series in which he recreates famous photographs, called “Cloned Photos“. See if you recognize any of these. Read the rest of this entry »
Andrew Lathrop came up with this novel way of building a simple radiation detector using an old compact camera, plastic scintillators, some reflective material, and black tape. A scintillator is material that lights up when exposed to radiation, and might be a little difficult for you to get your hands on unless you work in a science lab. Lathrop sent his idea to newspapers in Japan after the recent earthquake, but none of them decided to publish it.
If you want to make a “bullet time” video like the kind made famous by The Matrix, you don’t need a gigantic budget or 52 DSLRs lined up in a row. Just get a large group of friends, stand in a circle around your subjects, and snap pictures at the same time! Photoblog.hk recently held an event called “See You Around Hong Kong” where large groups of photography enthusiasts gathered to do just that.
Claire Chauvin over at Poopscape has a fun project for those of you who have useless 35mm negatives that are lying around and waiting to be tossed. All you need is a cheap and simple lamp (Chauvin used a $7 Ikea Grönö lamp) and some glue (e.g. Mod Podge). Carefully glue the strips onto the lamp and you’ll have yourself a unique, personalized lamp that’ll liven up any room in your house!
