camera

603 Articles

Adapting A 100-Year-Old Lens To A Modern Camera

May 1, 2026 by No comments

You can get all kinds of fancy lenses for modern cameras, with all sorts of mechanical and electronic wizardly to make them shoot better images. But what if you paired a vintage lens with a modern camera? It would take some work, as [Mathieu] found out, but you’d also get some interesting results.

The optic in question is a 100-year old lens—a Foth 50 mm f2.5 to be precise, originally used with a folding film camera. It was sourced from a market for just 3 euros. Notably, the lens was not designed for modern cameras, and so lacks an aperture and focusing mechanism. [Mathieu] thus had to fabricate something to fit the lens to a Sony FX3. A first attempt used an aperture adapter from Amazon and an elcoid adapter, but there were vignetting problems due to the lens placement in this case. Ultimately, [Mathieu] went with a special macro adapter that allowed him to control focus and tuck in an ND filter behind the lens, which made up for the lack of an aperture.

The vintage glass isn’t the sharpest lens out there, but that’s kind of what’s fantastic about it. The center of the frame is certainly focused, but it fades out softly towards the edges of the image, giving a cinematic, dreamlike effect. The bokeh in the background are particularly charming, too. As far as 3 euro lenses go, this one was a hit.

You can slap just about any lens on anything if you get creative with how you do it. Video after the break.

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A drill bit, not apparently rotating, descends toward a block of aluminium and throws up aluminium shavings as it passes through the block.

Freeze Moving Tools With A Stroboscopic Camera

April 26, 2026 by 19 Comments

If you take a video of a spinning wheel, you’ll probably notice that the spokes appear to turn more slowly than the wheel is actually rotating, and sometimes in the wrong direction. This is caused by a near match in the frame rate of the camera and the rate of rotation of the wheel – each time the camera captures a frame, the wheel has rotated a spoke into nearly the same position as in the last frame. If you time the exposures carefully, as [Excessive Overkill] did in his latest video, this effect can seemingly freeze moving objects, such as a fan or saw blade.

Most cameras only allow relatively coarse, fixed adjustments to frame rate, making it difficult to synchronize the shutter to an object’s motion. To get around this, [Excessive Overkill] used an industrial camera (previously used in this aimbot), which has fine frame rate control and external triggering. He connected the external trigger to a laser sensor, which detects a piece of retroreflective tape every time it passes by (for example, on one blade of a fan). When the laser sensor sends a signal, it also triggers a powerful LED flash. The flash is so powerful that dark materials create a hum when exposed to it, as pulses quickly heat the material, but each pulse is also so brief that the flash board doesn’t require any cooling.

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Photographing Rocket Chute Deployment At 10 Km

April 22, 2026 by 18 Comments

For those who haven’t been following along, [BPS.space] aka [Joe] is on a journey to launch a home-built rocket past the Kármán line where it will officially reach outer space. But one does not simply launch a rocket to outer space on the first try. The process is long and involves not only building a series of rockets, but designing and building propellant mixtures, solving aerodynamic problems, gaining several model rocket certifications along the way, and a whole host of other steps. He’s also documenting the entire process on video as well, which involves some custom camera work like this rocket selfie camera which will take an image of his rockets at apogee.

Like most problems in high-power rocketry, extremely tiny problems have a way of causing catastrophic failure, so every detail needs to be considered and planned for in the final design. For a camera that needs to jettison itself from the rocket at a precise moment after experiencing an incredible amount of forces, this is a complicated problem to solve. The initial design involves building a sled for a small deconstructed GoPro which uses springs and a servo to launch itself out of the rocket. The major problem with the design is that even the smallest torque on the sled will cause the camera to point in a random direction by the time it’s far enough from the rocket to take a picture. [Joe] tried a number of design iterations but could not get these torques to vanish.

One of the design limitations with this camera is that it won’t have any sort of parachute or tether itself to the rocket, so it will hit the ground at its terminal velocity. To keep that velocity down and improve survivability chances of the footage, the mass has to stay low. Eventually he settled on a semi-active control system by mounting a brass weight on a small motor, giving the camera module enough stability to stay pointed at the rocket long enough to take the video. Even though it hasn’t flown yet, admitting his first design wasn’t working at compromising on this solution which adds a bit of mass seems to be a good design change. We’ve been following along with his entire process so be sure to check out his actual rocket motor builds and teardowns as well.

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A Raspberry Pi Zero-based camera in a nice yellow case. There's a yellow lanyard, too.

Optocam Zero’s Pictures Look One Hundred

April 16, 2026 by 12 Comments

Yeah, we know, there’s a camera on your phone that does this and that. But these days its become trendy to turn towards older digital cameras in place of smartphones, and we can tell you from experience, that the joys of having a dedicated photographing contraption are many.

There’s plenty of cheap digital cameras on the secondhand market, but instead of fending off the clothes bros and other reseller types at the thrift store, stay home and build [Doruk Kumkumoğlu]’s Optocam Zero. Inspired by the Kodak Charmera and the like, [Doruk] aimed for something that’s playful, enjoyable, and intuitive to use.

Optocam Zero uses an auto-focus camera module and features eight photo filters. The screen dims when inactive to preserve battery life, but it can be charged back up with USB-C, and you can use it for the duration. And unlike my young adult camera, you don’t have to take out the SD card to see the pictures, just use the custom hotspot interface to transfer them.

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Pixel Camera Puts Lo-Fi Images In The Palm Of Your Hand

April 2, 2026 by 1 Comment

Some things have an undeniable appeal, and lo-fi, pixelated Game Boy-camera-like images are one of them. In service of this, [Raul Zanardo] created his handheld pixel camera that goes the extra mile. It implements slick real-time pixel art filters and a number of other useful features.

A live preview with real-time filters makes capturing just the right image easy.

For hardware, [Raul] uses a LilyGo T-Display S3 Pro which is an ESP32-based development board, camera, and color touchscreen display in a handheld form factor that vaguely resembles a chunky smartphone. The only change is swapping the stock camera for an OV3660-based camera module. It’s a drop-in replacement, but necessary because some of the features and settings his software uses are not available on the stock camera.

The camera captures 240 x 176 images, but the really neat part is the real-time filter pipeline. There are many configurable choices to play with, including pixelation, dithering, edge detection, CRT scanline effect, and color palette presets. Captures are saved to a local micro SD card and there’s all kinds of handy features like a photo gallery that takes full advantage of the color touchscreen. There’s also USB Mass Storage functionality, so downloading photos is as simple as plugging in a USB cable.

The Game Boy camera’s charming lo-fi imagery has inspired many pixel-camera projects, and this one makes great use of an inexpensive handheld development board and includes truly useful features.

Do you have your own pixel-art inspired camera project? Hit up our tips line and tell us all about it!

Every 3D Printable Film Camera, In One Place

April 1, 2026 by 4 Comments

For those of us who hack old cameras, the 3D printer has undoubtedly been a boon. High precision, or at least consistent precision, lightproof enclosures can be easily made and reproduced for others. As a result there are quite a few printable cameras out there, and we’ve featured our share here. We didn’t realize just how many there are without the work of [Sebastian] though, as he’s gathered together every one he can find in a glorious catalog of homemade photographic construction.

As a snapshot of the world of home made cameras it’s refreshing to see such a wide range of designs. There are pinholes aplenty as well as cameras using lenses from scavanged point and shoots through 35mm SLR, medium format, and even one using a Micro Four Thirds compact digital camera lens. For film there’s 35mm and 120 as well as large format, but we’re pleased to see a few instant cameras in there. Some of the models in the list are paid-for designs but most of them are free, so you probably won’t need any encouragement to make yourself a camera!

Unless we missed something, we didn’t see any movie cameras in the list. With 35mm and 16mm models to be found, we hope some of them make it.

Retro Open Source Camera Straight From The ’90s

March 30, 2026 by 7 Comments

In our modern society, we have started to take the humble camera for granted. Perhaps because of this, trendy standalone cameras have started to take off. Unfortunately, most of the time these cameras are expensive and not any better than those in our everyday smartphones. If only there were some open-source solution where you could build and customize your own standalone device? [Yutani] has done just that with the SATURNIX.

Simple microcontrollers and cameras meant for Raspberry Pis are a dime a dozen these days. Because of this, it’s no surprise to hear that the SATURNIX is based on recognizable hardware, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and an Arducam 16MP sensor. The Pi Zero powers both the sensors’ capture abilities and the interactive LCD display.

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