Photocritic photography blog

Okay, so technically it’s ‘hacking’ rather than cracking, but that’d ruin my beautifully alliterative subject line.

Anyway… If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box.

With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on it.

Pure, unadulterated awesome - check it out here! (via)

If you’re used to manual lenses, you know how easy it is to stop them down. If you are a little bit more advanced than that, and have ‘graduated’ to more advanced lenses, stopping down a lens (i.e making the aperture smaller) while it is not attached to a camera body can get a little problematic. There is a way to do it, however… Read the rest of the article »

Nowadays, digital cameras are so cheap that we are half a step away from getting them for free with happy meals at McD. That wasn’t the truth back in the day, however, which was why Matt Wandel decided to build his own. He cannibalised a $100 flatbed scanner, and used the parts to build a primitive scanning digital camera.

Of course, it is completely pointless now that the price of digicams has come down, but I felt all tingly-hearted when I came across this article - the mechanics involved are beautiful in their primitive way, and the results aren’t bad at all!

(cheers, Tom, for tipping us about this one. Do you have a tip? Why not email us on post@photocritic.org)

Disposable cameras have a lot of re-usable electronics in them. The flash unit, for example, is perfectly usable, even after the 27 exposures have come and gone. So what do you do? Well, DIY live decided to turn the disposable camera shell into a slave flashgun.

It ain’t for the faint of heart, this project, but if you are handy with a soldering iron, it may just be of use. Or you could of course buy one. But what’s the fun in that?

Hi! Just a quick one - I just stumbled across DIY live’s How to Solder guide (including the links at the bottom of that entry - pure gold-dust!. Read the rest of the article »

You know how your JPEG files have information stored about shutter times, focal lengths, your camera etc? Well, all of that info is stored in something called Exif tags (Exchangeable image file format). If you are geeky enough to ever have looked at the EXIF data specifications (more easily digestible on Wikipedia), you will have noticed that there are fields for co-ordinates inside the JPG file, much like GPS systems store world-positioning details. Read the rest of the article »

This one falls in the “if you are planning to do this, you have to hate your SLR” category. If you enjoyed our earlier tip about IR photography, you will probably have noticed that many cameras - especially DSLR cameras - have IR filters built into the body. Obviously, that means that you can’t use it for IR photography. Unless you remove the filter, that is… Read the rest of the article »

Sometimes, you can’t help but wonder why something obvious never occurred to you. Like the guy who got rich inventing that little thing that lifts the pizza box up from the middle of the pizza (link).

Another one is this guy, who takes two dirt-cheap digital cameras, and turns them into a stereographic camera, allowing you to take 3D photographs! The effect is not among the most obvious, but the ingenuity is quite nifty. check it out!

So, you are into your long exposure photography, such as night-time or macro photography? To get top quality photos, you’re going to need a remote control. And most of the time, this is going to set you back quite a lot of money, especially as the cheap as chips screw in type cable releases don’t work on new cameras anymore. Read the rest of the article »