Archive for Do It Yourself

Making a killing jar

If you want to get extremely close to insects, you may have to convince them to stop moving somehow. Sadly I have yet to come across tranquilliser darts for bumblebees (if you know of any, post a comment!), so killing them is the only way to persuade them to sit still. {democracy:37} It sounds terribly barbaric, but it isn't, really: If you make one of these jars correctly, you can kill insects quickly and painlessly. If you feel bad about it afterwards, you can always bury it in a tiny grave and sing it a song - make sure you get photos first, though!

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Learn photography step-by-step

I think it's pretty safe to say that I've got a new favourite website: instructables! It uses a flickr-style, very web 2.0 approach to doing 'do it yourself' guides: Hover-over-image items for descriptions of what you are looking at, and many of the instructables available guide you through projects baby-step by baby-step. There are a lot of them available already, mostly for geek projects. Luckily, there are some wicked photography DIY projects as well - well worth a peek!

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Keep the dust off your lens

If you've got a compact camera, you know how bloody annoying it is to have to clean your lens. It's tiny, and it seems to attract dust as if it was a lamp, and the dust were moths, confused by the lovely, bright source of light. Right? Right? Right. There's a ridiculously simple solution worth trying: When you know you're going to be in a particularly vulnerable situation (a desert, a dusty place, or a night on the lash*, for example), you could do some pre-emptive maintenance: Just cover up your lens with a piece of high-quality scotch tape! Important: Obviously, only use the following tip if your front lens element (that's the glass bit) doesn't actually stick out further than the lens barrel. Otherwise, you'll make your lens sticky and dirty and the whole point is gone!

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Your photos, 300-style!

Movie audiences of the world are vastly and completely amazed by the beauty of the new movie 300. With its extremely distinctive style, quick-moving plot and -- like Sin City, another of my favourites -- relatively closely based on one of Frank Miller's graphical novels, it's got it goin' on. If you've seen the film, you can't have failed to notice the amazing quality of the artwork involved: The CGI is amazing, of course, but even the live-action bits of the film is nothing short of stunning. So, how, exactly, can you recreate the effects? We interviewed graphic artist Jason Niedle to find out more...

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Emergency tripod? Piece of string!

The main problem of taking photos free-hand is that your hands aren't particularly sturdy. Myself, I find using a heavier camera makes it a lot easier (the inertia of the camera means it is reluctant to move, so up to a point, a heavy camera is easier to hold still for the duration of a photographic exposure than a very light camera.), but what about lighter cameras? The obvious answer is a tripod or a monopod, but these devices can be terribly heavy, and they are not particularly portable. One solution is to hold the camera against a surface (a tree, a building, or a signpost), but that doesn't always work either, and none of these items offer an awful lot of flexibility.

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DIY Digital Picture Frames

Photo frames are an easy way to add some gusto to your images. The future of this particular business, of course, is digital photography frames. You just upload some of your favourite photos to the frame, and then the frame cycles through the photos for you. If the frame is cleverly enough disguised and lit, it looks like a perfectly normal frame, with the only difference that the photo changes before your very eyes!

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Rescuing data from defective flash cards

If you've ever lost all your images of a memory card, due to failure, or by accidentally formatting it, you know how horrible it is. Back in the day, when you lose a roll of film to an accident, at least you can console yourself that you only lost up to 36 photos. Now, if you lose a large memorycard, you can lose hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos. Not very nice. Luckily, your memory card is likely to not lose all of the images, even if some were to become erased or corrupted...

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Create your own IR filter

A digital camera sees more infrared than we do, and all you need to do to capture it, is to block out all the visible (non-infrared) light. You can buy filters that do this, but they can be ridiculously expensive - and buying stuff removes all the fun of creating stuff, n'est-ce pas?

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