Homemade lenses are all the rage

Making your own lenses is all the rage these days, and we are all for that particular flavour of fun.

Mark Tucker makes a lens out of a Plunger, simultaneously creating what he claims is the ugliest camera in the world. MKAZ is a prolific lens maker who has photo essays and information about no less than 7 lenses he has made himself. Orbit 1 features a compact bellows-style lens which can also be used as a tilt/shift lens, and Chromasia takes it a step further, making an actual Tilt/Shift lens himself. Oh, and there’s of course our very own Pringles macro lens, too.

Bravo, guys, keep them coming!

Make Your Own Camera Remote Control

So, you are into your long exposure photography, such as night-time or macro photography? To get top quality photos, you’re going to need a remote control. And most of the time, this is going to set you back quite a lot of money, especially as the cheap as chips screw in type cable releases don’t work on new cameras anymore.

Not all is lost, though, if you don’t feel like forking out too much, you can make your own jack-type remote control for Remote control For Canon cameras.

If your camera uses the newer, N3-type remote control ports (that’s the round plug with three prongs), things become a little more tricky, as the actual connector is difficult to get by. However, if you do find one, this is how to wire it.

Nikon users also have a wealth of information available to them, if you for example run a F100 camera. Or you could build a more advanced, Infrared version, as seen for the D70.

In fact, there are probably schematics or technical drawings available for most remote controls – try a google search for your camera brand along with “remote” and either “schematic” or “build”.

Good luck!

Lomo photography

A Lomo camera is essentially a really, really low quality camera built in Russia. That doesn’t stop it from having a nearly religious following, however, and with the right attitude when wielding one of these cameras, it can be a very liberating photography experience.

Fuelled more by the fantastic PR campaign than by the quality of the actual cameras, the Lomo cameras do something really clever: They trade on their weaknesses. Light leaks? It’s a feature! Bad vignetting on the lens? It adds to the charm!. Impossible to get a correct exposure? It opens up for creativity.

Call us crazy, but it’s actually pretty damn cool.

I used to own a Lomo a while ago, and you can, indeed, get some pretty cool-looking photos with them. Now that low-fi is in, and retro is the way forward, Lomography may be your cheap ticket into photography cool.

The rest of the world is also cottoning on. BBC four, for example, shares this:

In 1991 a group of Viennese students discovered the Lomo Kompakt Automat when on holiday in Prague. This mass-produced Soviet camera was so cheap and easy to use that they shot rolls of film, ignoring the established rules of “good” photography. The resulting snaps were often odd to look at, out of focus and, due to the character of the Lomo lens, garishly coloured. But they were wonderfully fresh. The craze for Lomo spread so fast that when, in 1996, the St Petersburg manufacturers threatened to stop making the camera, Lomographers stepped in to guarantee all future sales.

Some examples

I won’t be pimping my own Lomo photos – they were good, but I didn’t quite like the unpredictability of the Lomo cameras myself, so I sold my camera again. For the examples, why not check out the photos on Flickr tagged with Lomo, or try the rampant fan-base over at the Flickr Lomo Group. There are also dozens of local groups worth checking out.

Enjoy!