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Learn photography step-by-step

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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!

instruct2.jpgSome of my favourite instructables include Photographing in the Ultraviolet spectrum, how to make a macro attachment for a digital compact, converting your Holga to a 35mm (more about holgas), a pretty good guide to creating QuickTime VR panoramas (although, if I were you, I’d use CleVR instead…), a superb guide to taking infra-red photos with your digital compact cameras, building a light tent.

There are also a few truly cheeky guides, such as how you can use a condom to water-proof your camera (it works, but most condoms are not fully translucent, so you’d struggle to get decent-quality photos with this technique)

instruct1.jpgThe instructable to introduction to band photography is decent as well, and well worth a look – but it’s not as good as Photocritic’s discussions of the same, obviously :-)

A quick search on instructables for ‘Photography’ comes up with 51 DIY guides of varying quality – great reading material for a lazy sunday morning!

(thanks, sam, for reminding me to do a post on Instructables! He wrote the condom-waterproof guide and the IR photo guide. Give it some love!)

Money made from this advert will be invested in prime lenses.
This post, "Learn photography step-by-step", is part of these categories: All articles, Become a better photographer, Do It Yourself, Featured Articles, Recommended by Photocritic, was posted by Haje Jan Kamps and saw the light of day on the 14th of April 2007. I hope you liked it.

Insights, suggestions and comments

By Jesse CT Photographer on April 23rd, 2007 (permalink)

This site is great. I just spent the last ten minutes reading about this guys LED light firefly project. I want to come up with something to post there now too.
j

 

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