Not exactly a photography related build, or at least not directly, but if you want to build your own LED lighting and you don’t happen to have a lab with a CRI testing facilities at your disposal, a spectrometer is a useful thing to have around. Whenever you want to check out those bargain LEDs you bought before you commit to building them into a light, stick them in front of this and look at …
DIY Wireless DSLR Tethering: Part 2
In the first part of this project I got to the point where I could wirelessly tether my DSLRs to the qDSLRDashboard application via a modified TP-Link MR3020 wireless router. Powering the MR3020 with a USB power bank gives a reasonably portable system, although for working in the field it’s not the slickest of setups as there are two boxes (router and power bank) rattling around needing to be secured. So in this post I’m …
Experiments with Flare Filters
One of the goals in my earlier post about producing anamorphic style artefacts by modifying the aperture of a Pentacon 50mm lens was to create the horizontal flares that are characteristic for these lenses. While fixing a fine strand of fishing line vertically across the new aperture does produce great flares, it also leaves an ugly shadow line in the elliptical out of focus highlights. As a result I opted not to include the fishing …
Anamorfake on a Budget
Back in the day, when films were being shot for projection on the wide screen, film makers couldn’t afford to waste any of the frame especially as they were already losing a band up the side for recording the audio. To address this anamorphic (cine) camera lenses were developed to horizontally compress the image so that a wide screen image filled the frame: when the film was projected onto the wide cinema screen, a corresponding …
DIY Film and Slide Digitising
As the lockdown continues in the UK (amongst other places) and it’s impossible to get out and about with a camera, it struck me that now would be a good time to do some digitising of the mountain of old slides and negatives that are sitting in boxes in the attic and cupboards. In the past I’ve used a 35mm film scanner to kind of get started on the process, but the results were pretty …