[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” →

[MM] has built a simple lighting adapter for analyzing skin lesions. Different layers of the skin absorb different parts of the light spectrum. By shining those particular wave lengths on the skin you can get an image of the lesion in various layers. This camera adapter is designed for a Nikon Coolpix E3100 digital camera. The ring of LEDs contains blue, green, red, and IR. White is included as well for taking normal pictures. A polarized filter is used to cut down on light reflections from the skin surface. The device does have some calibration issues since it was soldered by hand, but the preliminary results look very promising.

Continue reading “Camera Adapter For Detecting Melanoma” →

[Greg Lipscomb] was working on this disposable camera based slave flash when he stumbled into his macro photography project. Slave flashes are used as fill lighting and can be triggered by several different methods. Greg’s project uses a photocell and a microcontroller for trigger and timing. It also makes sure the flash stays charged. He concedes that this design is a bit complicated, but he went with it because he didn’t have any silicon controlled rectifiers available. The microcontroller would be too slow, but his Canon 10D uses a pre-flash before the actual photo, so the slave has a built in delay from that first flash.

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Most modern digital SLR cameras use matte focus screens with their autofocus systems instead of the split circle manual focus screens found in non-digital SLR cameras. Although not factory endorsed, there are replacement manual focus screens which can be very expensive. Reader [Jan-Erik Skata] decided to save some money by salvaging the focus screen from a Miranda dx-3 film camera. Removing the screen proved extremely difficult and the Miranda would have been a total loss if it had been functional. Once out, the screen was sanded down, cleaned and then placed in a Canon EOS 300D. It’s hard to take a picture of the screen through the view finder to prove that it works, but I’m sure Jan-Erik is taking some great photographs having completed this upgrade.

Continue reading “Manual Focus Screen For A Digital SLR” →

[markie] admits that this has been done. He attempts to solve this lack of originality with thoroughness. In the land of hacking that is truly a noble effort. He also put together an infrared illuminator to use with it, which is a nice touch.

Continue reading “Infrared Digicam” →

It’s been a couple months since the CVS camcorder downloading alpha release. [Matt Gilbert] thought it would be a good idea if we checked up on the community. There has been a lot progress made: from low level stuff like unearthing USB commands to upping the resolution and record length. Modding for macro work and building helmet mounts has also been done. A great overview of how all of this came about is the “credit where credit is due” post. Recently they’ve been dealing with new firmware versions that make the cameras harder to play with (sound familiar?). No worries though, if the solutions maintain the simplicity of jumping one wire there’s a bright future ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved in this project; you’ve done some incredible work.

Continue reading “CVS Camcorder Follow-up” →