I know the camera pictured looks kind of wonky, “They just glued a peephole to a digicam, right?” The fisheye camera guide from Aggregate.org goes much further than that. They’ve tried out the $4 peephole lens on almost every camera in the office and have built dedicated ones using $15 pen cameras. I don’t plan on building one of these, but I did find their guide for removing “dark noise” from images really interesting. Sensor noise can be fairly consistent from shot to shot. So with some smart subtraction of a black frame from an image you can remove noise without blurring the image. They have information on masking and projection conversion as well.

Continue reading “$20 Fisheye Digital Camera” →

[Jan-Erik Skata] recently had to perform surgery on his Canon 300D since the secondary mirror would not raise up (and if manually locked wouldn’t autofocus). His repair guide is good; you may remember his focus screen replacement. The thing I found really interesting was the site he referenced for his disassembly: Gary Honis’s Canon Digital Rebel (300D) Modification. Gary removes the IR cut glass from inside the camera and replaces it with a piece of clear glass. He then shows how to setup color correction and confirm that autofocus is still working correctly. He’s even got a mockup for how to add peltier cooling to the CMOS chip.

Continue reading “Canon 300D Mod For Astrophotography And IR Imaging” →