Photocritic photography blog

Nowadays, digital cameras are so cheap that we are half a step away from getting them for free with happy meals at McD. That wasn’t the truth back in the day, however, which was why Matt Wandel decided to build his own. He cannibalised a $100 flatbed scanner, and used the parts to build a primitive scanning digital camera.

Of course, it is completely pointless now that the price of digicams has come down, but I felt all tingly-hearted when I came across this article - the mechanics involved are beautiful in their primitive way, and the results aren’t bad at all!

(cheers, Tom, for tipping us about this one. Do you have a tip? Why not email us on post@photocritic.org)

Not strictly photography, but this project carries the Do It Yourself torch with such passion that I couldn’t let it go! Besides, if you decide to buid one of these, all you have to do is to add a photo camera to the end (it’s as easy as taking a compact camera and gaffer-taping it to the end of one of the eye-pieces), and you can use it for photography purposes!

A stereo-zoom microscope is a stereoscopic microscope in which the variation of magnification is continuous. The advantage is that you are able to adjust the magnification to suit yourself. You can pass gradually from one magnification to another, without losing sight of the sample. What makes this type of instrument astounding is that increasing the magnification will make it appear as though you are “diving into” the sample. The first time you do this, it will take your breath away. Read the rest of the article »

A while ago, we did a blog post on how to make your own camera remote control (link). In that post, I was complaining about how you could no longer use the old-fashioned cable shutter releases - a great loss, considering how cheap and foolproof they were, really.

Of course, one reader e-mailed us to point out that not all was lost, and that there was no real reason not to use these shutter releases - all you needed was a bit of DIY. Read the rest of the article »

You know how your JPEG files have information stored about shutter times, focal lengths, your camera etc? Well, all of that info is stored in something called Exif tags (Exchangeable image file format). If you are geeky enough to ever have looked at the EXIF data specifications (more easily digestible on Wikipedia), you will have noticed that there are fields for co-ordinates inside the JPG file, much like GPS systems store world-positioning details. Read the rest of the article »

This one falls in the “if you are planning to do this, you have to hate your SLR” category. If you enjoyed our earlier tip about IR photography, you will probably have noticed that many cameras - especially DSLR cameras - have IR filters built into the body. Obviously, that means that you can’t use it for IR photography. Unless you remove the filter, that is… Read the rest of the article »

We’ve featured a lot of macro stuff here on Photocritic before. Most of it has been focused around taking macro photos with an SLR camera. But what do you do when you don’t have an SLR? Are you out of luck? Not at all!

My friend Cameron kindly offered to write an introduction for Photocritic to what you can do if you have to use a compact digital camera for your macro photos… Read the rest of the article »

You may never have heard of Harold Edgerton, but we’re willing to bet that you know one of his most famous photos - the Bullet through the Apple.

Taken in 1964, it became a very famous image , not least because it was such an unusual photo based on a great achievement in high speed photography.

What you may not know, however, is that you can do a lot of high-speed photography stuff yourself, and much of it can be done on a tight budget, too! Read the rest of the article »

I have been knowing I had to do something on kite photography for ages, but I’ve been dreading it, because there are already so many great pages out there that deal with kite photography.

The idea is simple: You take a kite, and tie a camera to it. Then, you fly the kite, and you set off the camera somehow, taking photos from the unusual viewpoint of a bird. It’s actually not entirely unlike what the world-famous French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand is doing, sans helicopter.

Read the rest of the article »

Sometimes, you can’t help but wonder why something obvious never occurred to you. Like the guy who got rich inventing that little thing that lifts the pizza box up from the middle of the pizza (link).

Another one is this guy, who takes two dirt-cheap digital cameras, and turns them into a stereographic camera, allowing you to take 3D photographs! The effect is not among the most obvious, but the ingenuity is quite nifty. check it out!

With todays autofocus systems, most manufacturers are shipping their cameras with simple matte focusing screens. All good and well when the technologies are working, but what when they aren’t?

Focusing manually is an art, but a split-screen precision ground focussing matte screen can take a lot of the guesswork out of manually focussing a camera - if you have used a manual medium-format camera or an older SLR, you know what we’re talking about. Read the rest of the article »