Create Anthotype Photos Using the Photosensitive Juices of Plants
Looking for a weekend project? Try you hand at creating an anthotype, or an image created using photosensitive material from plants. Grind up some plant matter to harvest the juices, paint the juices onto some paper, place a negative over the paper, and then leave the image out under the sun. When it’s done exposing,...
This Holga Camera is Worth $24,000
This Holga camera is named the “Holga-Cam of the Apocalypse” and is worth $24,000. Photographer Mike Martens created it using a Holga 120N camera body worth $25 and a Phase One P25 digital back worth $24,000. The two components are fused together using a horseman lens board (hence the camera’s name) and a foot of...
Macro Shots Using a Canon 5D Mark II with a 4×5 Large Format Camera
London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4×5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent...
Distress Your Film by Putting It Through a Dishwasher Cycle
There’s a subgroup of film photographers who are dedicated to coming up with inventive new ways to distress film in order to achieve unexpected — and occasionally beautiful — results. Last year we shared that soaking film in rubbing alcohol does strange things to your images. Here’s another crazy idea: put a roll of film...
Use a Drop of Water as a Macro Lens for Phone Photographs
Here’s a super cool trick: instead of buying a special macro lens for your smart phone, simply use a drop of water! Carefully place a drop of water over your lens, carefully invert the phone, and voila — instant macro shots with the cheapest lens you’ll ever own. Alex Wild over at Scientific American has...
Astronaut Captures Photo From Orbit of Astronomers Flashing Space Station
This past Sunday, a group of amateur astronomers in San Antonio, Texas successfully “flashed” the International Space Station with a blue laser and spotlight as it whizzed by overhead. While this might sound like an easy thing to do, it’s much more complicated than you think. Astronaut Don Pettit shot the photo of the experiment...
Trippy Footage from a Digital Camera Mounted to an Electric Drill
Just in case you’ve always been wondering what it would look like to record footage with a camera attached to a spinning electric drill, French product designer Oscar Lhermitte did just that. The resulting footage is quite trippy, and would be a pretty unique way of capturing abstract photographs — as long as you don’t...
How to Shoot Sound Painting Photos with Paint and a Speaker
Last week we featured some “sound painting” photographs by Martin Klimas, captured by using a speaker to vibrate paint. Here’s a video tutorial by some Arizona State University Polytechnic students demonstrating how you can do your own “sound painting” photos. They use a thrift store speaker covered with a garbage bag and some Crayola poster...
Training a Newbie in One Week to Fake It as a Pro Photographer
Kai Wong over at DigitalRev recently conducted this interesting experiment in which they spent a week training a newbie photographer — an IT guy without any background — to go up head-to-head in a studio environment against an actual photographer. The goal was to see whether they could fake it well enough so that one...
Slow Motion Comparison: 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and 10000 FPS
Gav of The Slow Mo Guys made this interesting video comparing different high-speed camera frame rates. Using a Phantom HD camera, he films coffee mugs shattering on pavement at 500, 1000, 2500, 5000, and 10000 frames per second.
How to Fold an Origami Pinhole Camera Out of Photographic Paper
Here’s a neat idea for photographic experimentation: create a pinhole camera out of photographic paper by folding it into an origami box with the light-sensitive side on the inside. The hole that is used to blow the box into its shape is also used to expose the inside to the outside world. After exposing it,...
