[Project 326] has a cheap thermal camera that plugs into a smart phone. Sure they are handy, but what if you could hack one into a microscope with a resolution measured in microns? It is easier than you might think and you can see how in the video below.

Of course, microscopes need lenses, but glass doesn’t usually pass IR very well. This calls for lenses made of exotic material like germanium. One germanium lens gives some magnification. However, using a 3D printed holder, three lenses are in play, and the results are impressive.

The resolution is good enough to see the turns of wire in an incandescent light bulb. A decapsulated power transistor was interesting to view, too. Imaging heat at that much resolution gives you a lot of information. At the end, he teases that using first surface mirrors, he may show how to build an IR telescope as well.

Presumably, this will work with just about any IR camera if you adapt the lens holder. The unit in the video is a UNI-T UTi-260M. So when he says he spent about $35 on the build, that’s not including the $400 or so camera module.

IR imaging can pull off some amazing tricks, like looking inside an IC. If the thermal camera used in the video isn’t to your liking, there are plenty of others out there.

Astrophotography, and astronomy in general, takes some fairly specialized tools and a high amount of precision. Setting up the equipment can also take a lot of time, especially for amateurs traveling to various locations with their equipment, so anything that can reduce the amount of time spent looking for objects and increasing the amount of time looking at them is a welcome addition, especially since nights where conditions are ideal for these activities can be rare. [Anton] developed this real-time tracking tool for deep sky objects (DSOs) to keep tabs on most of the interesting things out there a telescope can be pointed at.

[Anton] calls his tool the Nova DSO Altitude Tracker and gets its information from SIMBAD, updating every minute for a given location on the planet. With that location data, the program calculates altitude and azimuth for various objects and also helps the user keep track of other important variables like moon illumination and angle above the horizon. It also allows the user to highlight specific objects of interest, making sure they are front and center throughout the session. Each DSO can be selected from a list to display detailed information about it such as its path, time visible in the sky, and other properties.

To get the program running, essentially all that’s required is a computer capable of running Python and a display of some sort. From there it provides a quick view of the best objects to point one’s telescope or camera at without any guesswork. With all of the code available it shouldn’t be too much of a leap to do other things with the underlying software, either, such as tying it into a tracker of some sort like this DIY telescope tracking device we featured a while back.

Typically, if you’re shooting 35 mm film, you’re using it in an old point-and-shoot or maybe a nice SLR. You might even make some sizeable prints if you take a particularly good shot. But you can get altogether weirder with 35 mm if you like, as [Socialmocracy] demonstrates with his “extreme sprocket hole photography” project (via Petapixel).

The concept is simple enough. [Socialmocracy] wanted to expose four entire rolls of 35 mm film all at the same time in one single shot. To be absolutely clear, we’re not talking about exposing a frame on each of four rolls at once. We’re talking about a single exposure covering the entire length of all four films, stacked one on top of the other.

To achieve this, an old-school Cirkut No.6 Outfit camera was pressed into service. It’s a large format camera, originally intended for shooting panoramas. As the camera rotated around under the drive of a clockwork motor, it would spool out more film to capture an image.

[Socialmocracy] outfitted the 100-year-old camera with a custom 3D-printed spool that could handle four rolls of film at once, rather than its usual wide single sheet of large format film. This let the camera shoot its characteristic panoramas, albeit spread out over multiple rolls of film, covering the sprocket holes and all. Hence the name—”extreme sprocket hole photography.”

It’s a neat build, and one that lets [Socialmocracy] use more readily available film to shoot fun panoramas with this old rig. We’ve featured some other great film camera hacks over the years, too, like this self-pack Polaroid-style film. Video after the break.

[Thanks to naMretupmoC for the tip!]

Gonzo journalism has been a hip thing since the 1970s or so, a way of covering a story in a compelling format with more subjectivity and less objectivity. The style has since been applied to all sorts of media, including film—and indeed, the makers of the Gonzo Pi.

The Gonzo Pi is a camera with an open source design, yes, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s intended to be an entire platform for film-making, all in the one housing. Camera-wise, the design combines a Raspberry Pi with the requisite first-party High Quality Camera, and warps it up in a 3D printed housing. You can build it up with a viewfinder and whatever old-school C-mount or 8 mm film lenses you can lay your hands on.

Beyond that, there’s an editing platform baked in to the device. It’s not unlike the tools in so many social media apps these days. The idea of the Gonzo Pi is that rather than shooting a whole ton of footage and takes and poring over them in great detail later, instead, you run and gun with the device and edit as you go. You can shoot retakes as you need, and even dub in more audio as necessary as you compose your film on the hoof. It’s intended to change the way you make films by virtue of its unique compositional paradigm.

We’ve featured some neat homebrew cameras before, to be sure, but none that quite put the edit suite right in the box.

[Thanks to Moritz for the tip!]

Holography is about capturing 3D data from a scene, and being able to reconstruct that scene — preferably in high fidelity. Holography is not a new idea, but engaging in it is not exactly a point-and-shoot affair. One needs coherent light for a start, and it generally only gets touchier from there. But now researchers describe a new kind of holographic camera that can capture a scene better and faster than ever. How much better? The camera goes from scene capture to reconstructed output in under 30 milliseconds, and does it using plain old incoherent light.

The new camera is a two-part affair: acquisition, and calculation. Acquisition consists of a camera with a custom electrically-driven liquid lens design that captures a focal stack of a scene within 15 ms. The back end is a deep learning neural network system (FS-Net) which accepts the camera data and computes a high-fidelity RGB hologram of the scene in about 13 ms.  How good are the results? They beat other methods, and reconstruction of the scene using the data looks really, really good.

One might wonder what makes this different from, say, a 3D scene captured by a stereoscopic camera, or with an RGB depth camera (like the now-discontinued Intel RealSense). Those methods capture 2D imagery from a single perspective, combined with depth data to give an understanding of a scene’s physical layout.

Holography by contrast captures a scene’s wavefront information, which is to say it captures not just where light is coming from, but how it bends and interferes. This information can be used to optically reconstruct a scene in a way data from other sources cannot; for example allowing one to shift perspective and focus.

Being able to capture holographic data in such a way significantly lowers the bar for development and experimentation in holography — something that’s traditionally been tricky to pull off for the home gamer.

Instant photography occupies a niche in film photography that has endured despite its relatively high cost and the ease of newer digital technologies. There are two main manufacturers, Polaroid and Fujifilm, as well as a few smaller boutique camera makers. Into this comes [Toast], with an entirely 3D printed instant camera, not a Polaroid as he calls it, but one for Fuji Instax Mini film.

Currently available instant film comes in cartridges in which each picture is a layered design with a sachet of developing chemicals at the end. Once the film part has been exposed it is developed by passing through a set of rollers which squeeze the chemicals evenly over the film, allowing it to develop. The camera in the video below the break is simple enough, a pinhole box camera design, but the huge challenge and the interesting part of the video comes in the developer attachment which has those rollers. It’s considerably more challenging than it might at first appear, and he goes through many iterations before getting it right with some steel rollers.

The 3D print files are available but only at a price, and despite that we think there’s enough in the video below for anyone who wants to experiment for themselves. For the rest of us it’s an insight into a technology we all know about, but maybe have never looked closely at.

Instax has appeared here before, usually as an instant back for older cameras, but sometimes for far tastier projects.

If you’re into Soviet-era gear with a techy twist, you’ll love this teardown of a rare Zenit 19 camera courtesy of [msylvain59]. Found broken on eBay (for a steal!), this 1982 made-in-USSR single-lens reflex camera isn’t the average Zenit. It features, for example, electronically controlled shutter timing – quite the upgrade from its manual siblings.

The not-so-minor issue that made this Zenit 19 come for cheap was a missing shutter blade. You’d say – one blade gone rogue! Is it lost in the camera’s guts, or snapped clean off? Add to that some oxidized battery contacts and a cracked viewfinder, and you’ve got proper fixer-upper material. But that’s where it gets intriguing: the camera houses a rare hybrid electronic module (PAPO 074), complete with epoxy-covered resistors. The shutter speed dial directly adjusts a set of resistors, sending precise signals to the shutter assembly: a neat blend of old-school mechanics and early electronics.

Now will it shutter, or stutter? With its vertical metal shutter – uncommon in Zenits – and separate light metering circuitry, this teardown offers a rare glimpse into Soviet engineering flair. Hungry for more? We’ve covered a Soviet-era computer and a radio in the past. If you’re more into analog camera teardowns, you might like this analog Pi upgrade attempt, or this bare minimum analog camera project.

A couple of years ago we were excited to read news of an entirely 3D printed camera, right down to the shutter. We wrote it up back then but sadly the required STL files were not yet available. Now after time away with his family, its creator [Mark Hiltz] is back. The medium-format Pioneer Camera can now be downloaded for printing in its entirety under a Creative Commons licence.

Looking at the design, it appears to be a relatively straightforward build. The shutter is extremely simple, as far as we can see, relying on magnets to ensure that the open part of its rotation is at an unstable repulsing point between stable magnetic poles. The images aren’t perfect because he’s using a very simple lens, but this is part of the charm of a camera like this one. We hope that people will take it and produce refinements to the design making for a cheap and good entry to medium format photography.

While you’re printing your own Pioneer, take a look at our original coverage.

Camerai is a fantastic face swapping tool offered by Fal.ai to demonstrate real-time inference. Using your webcam or camera, it can warp your face into pretty much anything you want in real-time! There is a text prompt box where you simply write what (or who) you want to look like, for example: celebrity faces, accessories, […]

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