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...
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...
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,...
Push The Envelope
Fear.
Failure.
Experimentation.
Innovation.
There's no easy way to go about tackling these thoughts and ideas. We all have fears that can hinder our growth as artists. The act of making photographs, not taking pictures, is a deep desire that pushes the...
Floating Light Words with Custom Bokeh
Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher had the brilliant idea of using custom bokeh to spell out words in his videos, and spent a good amount of time developing and perfecting the idea. The above video, titled “Light Works”, is a demonstration of this technique in action. The results are pretty awesome. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how it...
Using a Leica Noctilux on a Sony NEX
Darren Chan recently attached his $6,500 Leica Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens to his Sony NEX-5 camera using an adapter in order to test out the unique combo. As you might expect, the combo is great for creamy bokeh and doing nighttime street photography in areas with low light. Here are some photographs from Chan’s experimentation:...
