A Shutter Speed Tester With Frickin’ Lasers!

July 7, 2023 by Jenny List 12 Comments

Buying old cameras is one of the best ways yet found to part a geek from their money, but if you don’t mind finding a few duds along the way it’s still possible to pick up something nice without paying the excessive scene tax of an Etsy seller or an online store. The trouble is, in the many decades during which your purchase went from being pride and joy to forgotten in a drawer to lying on the shelf of a thrift store, its performance may have degraded a little. Does the shutter still operate as it should? How long is a split second anyway? You need a shutter speed tester, and luckily for us, [Stuart Brown] has one.

There are no sharks involved in this build, but it does rely on laser diodes as a light source. There are three of them as well as three sensors, packaged photodiodes with a Schmidt trigger. These feed an Arduino which is hooked up to a TFT display, and the software measures how long each diode receives the light. We’re told it can also measure the raise time on curtain shutters, another important metric.

There’s little in the way of usage examples, but we’re guessing it requires positioning the camera between lasers and photodiodes. We’re curious as to how such an instrument would perform on a camera with a fixed lens, or whether it’s only suitable for those with access to the shutter itself. If this subject interests you, it’s not the first shutter speed tester we’ve shown you.

Header image: Runner1616, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Probably The Cheapest Lens You Will Ever Use

July 5, 2023 by Jenny List 23 Comments

Photographic enthusiasts will invariably amass an extensive collection of lenses, and in their communities there are near-mythical and sought-after lenses that change hands for incredible prices. It’s probably the oldest photographic adage though, that the best camera in the world is the one in your hand when the scene presents itself, and probably one of the simplest cameras in the world remains the disposable film camera. Their tiny plastic lenses are not in the same league as the pricey ones, but can they be used by a more serious photographer? [Volzo] set out to find out.

Disposable cameras aren’t the most environmentally friendly items, and he rightly points out that a cheap compact camera can deliver the same in a more sustainable package. There’s also the point to make that the flash capacitor if it has one can deliver a nasty shock, but once past that it’s easy to remove the lens itself.

A single element lens brings with it some significant distortion, and it’s a surprise to find that the focal plane of a disposable camera is curved to take account of that. His first 3D printed mount and adapter for a Sony mirrorless compact camera uses a small aperture to reduce the distortion effects from the edge of the lens but he’s not out of tricks yet. Using a pair of the lenses back-to-back he halves the focal length but further corrects the distortion and delivers a consequent wider angle. Take a look, in the video below.

The result is a usable lens for the toy-camera look on your digital camera, and since the files can all be found at the link above it’s something you can try too. If a disposable camera comes our way, we certainly will.

This isn’t the first disposable camera lens project we’ve brought you.

Continue reading “Probably The Cheapest Lens You Will Ever Use” →

An All Sky Camera To Watch The Night Sky

July 1, 2023 by Jenny List 8 Comments

If you have any astronomer friends you’ll soon discover that theirs is a world of specialist high-quality optical equipment far ahead of the everyday tinkerer, and for mere mortals the dream of those amazing deep space images remains out of reach. It’s not completely impossible for the night sky to deliver impressive imagery on a budget though, as [David Schneider] shows us with a Raspberry Pi powered whole sky camera.

The project was born of seeing a meteor and idly wondering whether meteorite landing sites could be triangulated from a network of cameras, something he quickly discovered had already been done with some success. Along the way though he found the allsky camera project, and decided to build his own. This took the form of a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Pi HQ camera with a wide-angle lens mounted pointing skywards under an acrylic dome. It’s not the Hubble Space Telescope by any means, but the results are nevertheless impressive particularly in a timelapse. We wish there were less light pollution where we live so we could try it for ourselves.

Long-term readers may remember that this isn’t the first Pi sky camera we’ve brought you, for example this one is from 2020.

Continue reading “An All Sky Camera To Watch The Night Sky” →

This Camera Does Not Exist

June 25, 2023 by Jenny List 26 Comments

Blender is a professional-grade 3D-rendering platform and much more, but it suffers sometimes from the just-too-perfect images that rendering produces. You can tell, somehow. So just how do you make a perfectly rendered scene look a little more realistic? If you’re [sirrandalot], you take a photograph. But not by taking a picture of your monitor with a camera. Instead, he’s simulating a colour film camera in extraordinary levels of detail within Blender itself.

The point of a rendering package is that it simulates light, so it shouldn’t be such a far-fetched idea that it could simulate the behaviour of light in a camera. Starting with a simple pinhole camera he moves on to a meniscus lens, and then creates a compound lens to correct for its imperfections. The development of the camera mirrors that of the progress of real cameras over the 20th century, simulating the film with its three colour-sensitive layers and even the antihalation layer, right down to their differing placements in the focal plane. It’s an absurd level of detail but it serves as both a quick run-down of how a film camera and its film work, and how Blender simulates the behaviour of light.

Finally we see the camera itself, modeled to look like a chunky medium format Instamatic, and some of its virtual photos. We can’t say all of them remove the feel of a rendered image, but they certainly do an extremely effective job of simulating a film photograph. We love this video, take a look at it below the break.

Continue reading “This Camera Does Not Exist” →

Thermal Camera Reviewed

June 16, 2023 by Al Williams 13 Comments

We keep thinking about buying a better thermal camera, as there are plenty of advantages. While [VoltLog’s] review of the Topdon TC002 was interesting though, it has a connector for an iPhone. Even if you aren’t on Android, there is a rumor that Apple may (or may be forced to) change connectors which will make it more difficult to connect. Of course, there will be adapters, and you can get a USB C version of the same camera.

Technically, the camera is pretty typical of other recent cameras in this price range, and they probably all use the same image sensor. The camera provides 256×192 images.

Continue reading “Thermal Camera Reviewed” →

IKEA LACK Table Becomes Extremely Affordable DIY Copy Stand

June 16, 2023 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

A copy stand is a tool used to capture images of photos, artwork, books, and things of a similar nature. It holds a camera perpendicular to a large and flat surface, upon which the subject rests.

A threaded rod provides effective vertical adjustment.

They are handy, but there’s no need to spend a lot when [BlandPasta]’s DIY copy stand based on a cheap IKEA LACK table can be turned into an economical afternoon project with the help of simple hardware and a few 3D printed parts.

The main structure comes from a mixture of parts from two LACK tables: one small and one normal-sized. A tabletop is used as the bed, and the square legs make up the structural parts with the help of some printed pieces. A threaded rod combined with some captive hardware provides a way to adjust the camera up and down with a crank, while one can manually slide the horizontal camera mount as needed to frame the subject appropriately.

This is a clever remix of IKEA parts, and the somewhat matte white finish of the LACK complements photography well. Adding some DIY LED lighting is about all it takes to get a perfectly serviceable copy stand that won’t break the bank.

A Super-Cheap Turntable Build For Photographic Purposes

June 13, 2023 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

When it comes to photographing products or small items, sometimes it’s useful to get vision from all angles. Shooting a video of an item on a turntable is an ideal way to do this. [ROBO HUB] built a super-cheap turntable for just this purpose.

The build relies upon a regular micro servo to handle rotating the turntable. However, it has been modified from stock to rotate 360 degrees instead of its usual 180 degree range of motion. This is a common hack that allows servos to be used for driving wheels or other rotating mechanisms. In this case, though, any positional feedback is ignored. Instead, the servo is just used as a conveniently-geared motor, with its speed controlled via a potentiometer. A CD covered in paper is used as a turntable, with the electronics and motor assembled in a cardboard base.

It’s a simple hack, and one you can probably put together with the contents of your junk drawer. Combined with a lightbox, it could up your photo and video game significantly. Those skills are super useful when it comes to documenting your projects, after all!