Tag Archives: Photography

Shoot-And-Forget Digital Photo Frame

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Digital photo frames these days require you to manage the photos stored on it or the cloud-based service tied to the frame’s manufacturer. [Henric Andersson] realized that he and his wife take a lot of photos but find little time to go through them — like photo albums of days past — and add them to any photo frame-like appliance or service. Since Google photos can do a lot of the sorting for them, he decided to incorporate that into a digital photo frame.

Using his wife’s old Viewsonic 24” 1080p monitor, he cracked it open and incorporated the screen …read more

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Scan Your Film The 3D Printed Way

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Everyone has a box or two at home somewhere full of family photographs and slides from decades past. That holiday with Uncle Joe in Florida perhaps, or an unwelcome reminder of 1987’s Christmas jumper. It’s fair to say that some memories deserve to be left to gather dust, but what about the others in a world of digital images?

You could of course buy a film scanner to digitize Uncle Joe on the beach, but aside from the dubious quality of so many of them where’s the fun in that? Instead, how about 3D printing one? That’s what [Alexander Gee] …read more

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Photograph of Single Atom Captured with a Plain Old Camera

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The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council awarded a remarkable photograph its overall prize in science photography. The subject of the photograph? A single atom visible to the naked eye. Well, perhaps not exactly the naked eye, but without a microscope. In the picture above (click here to enlarge), the atom is that pale blue dot between the two needle-like structures.

You probably learned in school that you couldn’t see a single atom, and that’s usually true. But [David Nadlinger] from the University of Oxford, trapped a positively charged strontium atom in an ion trap and then irradiated it with …read more

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Plastic Model Emulates the First Untethered Spacewalk

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Here’s something really wonderful. [Dave Akerman] wrote up the results of his attempt to use a high-altitude balloon to try to re-create a famous image of NASA’s Bruce McCandless floating freely in space with the Earth in the background. [Dave] did this in celebration of the 34th anniversary of the first untethered spacewalk, even going so far as to launch on the same day as the original event in 1984. He had excellent results, with plenty of video and images recorded by his payload.

Adhering to the actual day of the spacewalk wasn’t the only hurdle [Dave] jumped to make …read more

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Immersive VR with a 200-Degree Stereoscopic Camera

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VR is in vogue, but getting on board requires a steep upfront cost. Hackaday.io user [Colin Pate] felt that $800 was a bit much for even the cheapest commercial 360-degree 3D camera, so he thought: ‘why not make my own for half that price?’

[Pate] knew he’d need a lot of bandwidth and many GPIO ports for the camera array, so he searched out the Altera Cyclone V SOC FPGA and a Terasic DE10-Nano development board to host it. At present, he has four Uctronics OV5642 cameras on his rig, chosen for their extensive documentation and support. The camera mount …read more

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A Thoughtful Variety of Projects and Failures

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Our friends at [The Thought Emporium] have been bringing us delightful projects but not all of them warrant a full-fledged video. What does anyone with a bevy of small but worthy projects do? They put them all together like so many mismatched LEGO blocks. Grab Bag #1 is the start of a semi-monthly video series which presents the smaller projects happening behind the scenes of [The Thought Emporium]’s usual video presentations.

Solar eclipse? There are two because the first was only enough to whet [The Thought Emporium]’s appetite. Ionic lifters? Learn about the favorite transformer around the shop and see …read more

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Take a Time-Lapse or Bake a Cake with this Kitchen Timer Panning Rig

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Seems like the first thing the new GoPro owner wants to do is a time-lapse sequence. And with good reason – time-lapses are cool. But they can be a bit bland without a little camera motion, like that provided by a dirt-cheap all-mechanical panning rig.

Let’s hope [JackmanWorks]’ time-lapse shots are under an hour, since he based his build on a simple wind-up kitchen timer, the likes of which can be had for a buck or two at just about any store. The timer’s guts were liberated from the case and a simple wooden disc base with a 1/4″-20 threaded …read more

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How to Take Pictures of PCBs

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While we’ve covered light box builds and other DIY photography solutions, general picture-snapping tips and tricks are a bit out of the purview of what we normally write about. Nevertheless, [Alain] just put up a great tutorial for taking pictures of PCBs. This is a great skill to have — no one cares about what you’ve built unless you have a picture of it — and the same techniques can be applied to other small bits and bobs of electronic equipment.

As with all matters of photography, light is important. [Alain] built a DIY light box using two cheap outdoor …read more

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DIY Illuminator for UV Fluorescence Photography

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The image shown is the mineral Hackmanite, which fluoresces under ultraviolet lighting. However, not all UV is created equal, and that makes a difference if you’re into UV imaging. The image for this article is from [David Prutchi] and shows the striking results of using different wavelengths of UV. [David] goes into detail on how to make your own DIY Long, Medium, and Short-wave UV Illuminator complete with part numbers and wiring diagram. The device isn’t particularly complicated; the real work was determining the exact part numbers and models of lamp, filters, and ballasts required to get the correct results. …read more

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