Reskin a Praktica for £1

Yes you can give your old Praktica a new lease of life for just one quid. There’s a growing trend to replace the leather/plastic trims on vintage cameras with fancy new wood veneers, posh patterned leathers or exotic animal skins. All options cost a fair few quid and usually mean you sending off for a …

Wanderlust Travelwide Lightweight 5×4 camera

The Travelwide, due for release Summer 2014, weighs just 275 grams making it lighter than a DSLR and the lightest 5×4 ever made. It has an impact-resistant glass-filled ABS construction with a high-precision focusing screen from 0.55m to infinity using the Schneider Angulon 90mm ƒ/6.8 lens (not included). There are three accessory shoes to mount …

Olympus Trip 35 guide

The Olympus Trip 35 is a 35mm metal bodied point & shoot compact camera that was produced from 1967 to 1984. In the 70s Olympus created an advertising campaign that featured British fashion photographer David Bailey. While famous in photography and fashion circles, he became a household name thanks to that campaign. People would say …

How to process scanned colour negatives

In the last article we showed you how to make a custom slide duplicator for 35mm negatives and transparencies. And the first problem you will encounter when you start scanning your colour negatives  is how to convert the result to a positive digital file. When you use a proper film scanner it has built in …

DIY negative copier for Olympus OM-D

If you’ve moved over to digital from film, chances are you will have a collection of film based photographs – either negatives or transparencies.  If you don’t have a film scanner you can use your digital camera to digitise these old films. I decided to do that using my Olympus OM-D. The problem I had …

Photograph the Blood Moon

On the 15th of April you’ll be able to photograph the first of four total lunar eclipses. They’re sometimes referred to as blood moons, because of the colour the moon becomes as the eclipse takes place. You;ll need a camera with a fairly long lens (unless you crop later in an image editing program) and …

Photographers utilise 3D printing technology

3D printing could be the photographer’s savior. These clever devices print from 3d map files using resin or powder that’s built up in layers to form complex shaped objects. These printers cost thousands of pounds a few years ago, but now you can pick up a home printer such as the CTC 3D Printer (below) …

Digiscoping – bird photography with spotting scopes

Wildlife photographers often wish they owned a longer lens of 500mm or so to taking close ups of birds and other smaller creatures. And often they may  already have such a lens in the form of a spotting scope. By attaching the camera to the rear end of the spotting scope you create a lens …

Interesting Camera Concepts 1: Digibinos

In this occasional series we’ll take a look at design concepts that have tried to revolutionize the way we take photos. The first in the series looks at digibinos. A hybrid product combining binoculars with a digital camera.  Pentax came up with the innovation announcing their DB-100 model in March 2002. Having a camera combined …