Tag Archives: Photography

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Printer For Alternative Photography

Posted on by

Film photography began with a mercury-silver amalgam, and ended with strips of nitrocellulose, silver iodide, and dyes. Along the way, there were some very odd chemistries going on in the world of photography, from ferric and silver salts to the prussian blue found in Cyanotypes and blueprints.

Metal salts are fun, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [David Brown] is building a printer for these alternative photographic processes. It’s not a dark room — it’s a laser printer designed to reproduce images with weird, strange chemistries.

Cyanotypes are made by applying potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate to some sort …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Printer For Alternative Photography→

Building a Full-Spectrum Digital Camera on the Cheap

Posted on by

The sensor on your digital camera picks up a lot more than just the light that’s visible to the human eye. Camera manufacturers go out of their way to reduce this to just the visible spectrum in order to produce photos that look right to us. But, what if you want your camera to take photos of the full light spectrum? This is particularly useful for astrophotography, where infrared light dramatically adds to the effect.

Generally, accomplishing this is just a matter of removing the internal IR-blocking filter from your camera. However, most of us are a little squeamish about …read more

Continue reading Building a Full-Spectrum Digital Camera on the Cheap→

Automating A Microscope For CNC Micrographs

Posted on by

[Maurice] is a photographer specializing in micrographs. These very large images of very small things are beautiful, but late last year he’s been limited by his equipment. He needed a new microscope, one designed for photography, that had a scanning stage, and ideally one that was cheap. He ended up choosing a microscope from the 80s. Did it meet all his qualifications? No, but it was good enough, and like all good tools, capable of being modified to make a better tool.

This was a Nikon microscope, and [Maurice] shoots a Canon. This, of course, meant the camera mount was …read more

Continue reading Automating A Microscope For CNC Micrographs→

One Hacker’s Small Tabletop Photo Studio

Posted on by

We love good pictures. You know, being worth a thousand words and all. So, after our article on taking good reference photos, we were pleased to see a reader, [Steve], sharing his photography set-up.

Taking good technical photos is a whole separate art from other fields of photography like portraiture.  For example, [Steve] mentions that he uses “bullseye” composition, or, putting the thing right in the middle. The standard philosophy on this method is that it’s bad and you are bad. For technical photos, it’s perfect.

[Steve] also has some unique toys in his arsenal. Like a toy macro lens …read more

Continue reading One Hacker’s Small Tabletop Photo Studio→

Leica’s Rugged New Camera Can Take a Dip, a Spill, Whatever

Posted on by

Leica’s cameras have proven their excellence in war zones and on city streets. But you’d have to be batshit-insane to take one snorkeling. The post Leica’s Rugged New Camera Can Take a Dip, a Spill, Whatever appeared first on WIRED. Continue reading Leica’s Rugged New Camera Can Take a Dip, a Spill, Whatever→

UV Photographic Printer Lets You Use Strange Chemistries

Posted on by

There is a family of old photographic chemistries based on iron compounds which, like the blueprint, are exposed using UV light. Ironically, the digital camera revolution which has made everything else in our photographic lives much easier, has made it harder to experiment around with these alternative methods. [David Brown] is making a UV photographic printer to change that.

[David]’s application has a lot in common with PCB printers that use a UV-sensitive resist, only [David] needs greyscale, and it might also be nice if it could work with wet paper. This makes it a more challenging project than you …read more

Continue reading UV Photographic Printer Lets You Use Strange Chemistries→