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Photographer Transformed a Panasonic Lumix G9 II Into a Leica Look-Alike https://petapixel.com/2026/01/09/photographer-transformed-a-panasonic-lumix-g9-ii-into-a-leica-look-alike/ #panasoniclumixg9ii #cameraproject #DoItYourself #customcamera #Equipment #Spotlight #panasonic #leicam #leica #DIY

This Awesome DIY Digital Camera Has a Waist-Level Viewfinder https://petapixel.com/2025/08/28/this-awesome-diy-digital-camera-has-a-waist-level-viewfinder/ #waistlevelviewfinder #malcolmjaywilson #digitalcamera #malcolmwilson #DoItYourself #customcamera #camerahacks #Equipment #3dprinted #mamiya #News #Sony #DIY

Two Years Later, This Awesome 3D-Printed Film Camera Is Available to All https://petapixel.com/2025/02/11/two-years-later-this-awesome-3d-printed-film-camera-is-available-to-all/ #3DPrintedCamera #pioneercamera #DoItYourself #analogcamera #customcamera #3dprinting #filmcamera #Equipment #120camera #diycamera #markhiltz #120film #Analog #analog #News #DIY

Gorgeous Underwater Whale Footage Shot With Custom 18.7K Cine Camera https://petapixel.com/2024/08/26/gorgeous-underwater-whale-footage-shot-with-custom-18-7k-cine-camera/ #highresolution #customcamera #cinecamera #underwater #Spotlight #ultrahd #achtel #News #18k

Ricoh GRm: My Custom ‘Monochrom’ Camera

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Photographer Captures Six Meteor Showers in One Photo

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Photographer Makes DIY Lenses with Cake Molds and Epoxy

In an effort to challenge herself, Italian photographer Ursula Ferrara has made her own lenses for her large-format film camera using plastic epoxy and silicone cake molds.

Ferrara is a photographer, painter, and animation film director from Italy who first became interested in photography at age 13 when she started shooting with her father's Leica. She is the author of several short animated films that have been recognized in film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, and Locarno. She regularly experiments with different photographic techniques, which includes converting an old camper van into a giant camera as well as previously converting a Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide into a camera that can take tiny wet plate collodion photos.

For her most recent project, Ferrara decided to make her own lenses for her mid-1900s-era 8×10 Eastman Commercial large-format camera. She tells PetaPixel that the idea to do so came from her past where she has built many cameras including a 16×20-inch with scrap Ikea parts, so she wanted to push herself to different challenges and attempt to make her own lenses.

"I tried a design that used ice, but it wasn't very good," she says. "But working with water got me thinking about using resin."

Ferarra says that she first found the epoxy she wanted to use, which ended up being a clear casting resin, and then purchased a set of silicone cake molds that she would use to form the curves of the optics.

She says she ended up making dozens of different lenses at different sizes with different curves and thicknesses in an attempt to mimic what she saw in commercial glass lenses.

"I made many mistakes," she tells Petapixel. "Basically, I kept repeating the same mistake involving the curvature until I understood that there was a nearly imperceptible flattening on the base of each mold. So I finally corrected that by tilting the mold at an angle and was able to get the perfect shape. I changed the position of the mold as it dried so the curvature was perfect."

She says the process of trial and error took her about three months before she created a set of optics that actually worked. The lenses that "failed" would result in images that were far too blurry to be considered usable. But once she had a set she was happy with a set of lenses, she mounted them to her large-format camera.

She chose to use a plano-convex lens design that would focus through a small diaphragm. Plano-convex lenses combine one spherical surface and one flat surface and are simple, all-purpose focusing elements. The image above shows her diaphragm, which she positioned about three centimeters behind the main curved optic before pointing it at a subject.

He design worked, and below are a few sample photos that she captured using her custom, hand-made, epoxy lens:

Though she has made cameras before, Ferarra says she has never made optics and has no history with optical design. The fact that she was able to make a working plastic lens she says was "lucky." More likely, it was a combination of past experiences with building her own cameras and understanding the principles of photography. Whatever the case, her finished product is no less impressive.

For more from Ursula Ferrara, make sure to check out her website.

#doityourself #equipment #features #ideas #custom #customcamera #diy #epoxy #film #handmade #lensdesign #lenses #planoconvex #planoconvexlens #ursulaferrara

Photographer Recreates Large Format Film Look with a Digital Camera

Ukrainian photographer Olexiy Shportun has created an image capture device that combines a digital camera with a system that resembles a large format film camera to produce dreamy, bokeh-rich still-life photos and portraits.

Shportun's full camera system is huge and slow to use by modern standards, but it allows him to achieve images that have a shallow depth of field and dreamy quality that bypasses what would normally not be possible through more conventional capture methods.

He says that his idea was to create a digital version of an analog large format photo, but avoid the color photo process associated with film of this size.

"This method does not require any kind of disposal of photochemistry," he says. "Compared to photographing through a viewfinder, this method gives a higher quality image since it is devoid of problems with grain, vignetting, and rings from the fresnel lens and the design of the entire camera is more compact than cameras created on the principle of shooting through frosted glass."

Shportun says that he came up with this idea while experimenting with combining digital and analog philosophies, as he used to take photos on photo paper on a homemade large format camera.

"For a long time, I could not achieve acceptable image quality when shooting through frosted glass," he says. "I was looking for the best materials for a matte screen, various tracing paper, and films, Fresnel lenses, and at some point, I thought, why not approach this problem from the other side?"

The appearance of his device resembles a large format camera.

"The difference is that the rear standard is just a movable wall that measures 40×40 centimeters with a white matte screen facing towards the camera," he explains. In the illustration below, he shows the position of the front-facing lens and the digital camera compared to the screen.

"The front standard houses a large format lens which has an image field over 40 centimeters in diameter when focused to infinity. At the same time, the distance from the rear of the lens to the white screen is 30 centimeters. A digital camera with a zoom lens (in my case, 14-42mm) is installed above the lens and directed through a hole in the front standard onto a white screen."

Shportun projects an image from the large format lens and captures it with his digital camera to that is facing inwards towards the screen to create a finished image.

A view from inside the camera.

"While shooting, you first need to look through the viewfinder of the digital camera and focus the white screen on the photographed object to frame the image," he explains. "After that, it is necessary to additionally focus the digital camera lens to the white screen."

He says that it is of course possible to directly connect the large-format lens to his digital camera with an adapter, but he argues that would only grant him a "miserable" portion of the image field of the lens and was therefore not a solution he was willing to entertain.

His technique is slow and methodical, but Schportun says it allows him to make digital large format-style images.

"We get color digital photography with an amazing depth of field with only a compact camera with a zoom lens at our disposal," he explains.

To see more of Olexiy Shportun's images, follow him on Instagram or visit his website here.

_Image credits: Photos by Olexiy Shportun and used with permission. _

#culture #equipment #news #analog #bokeh #custom #customcamera #customsolution #digital #film #homemade #largeformat #olexiyshportun #unique

Lessons Learned From Making My Own Large-Format ‘Cyanocamera’

I started learning digital photography in 2016 with an old DSLR. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve taken quite a few pictures and timelapses I’m proud of, but until recently, I’d never considered the analog world.

Figuring that if it was worth doing, it was worth overdoing, my first analog camera was an 11×15-inch large format camera that was designed to use Mike Ware’s New Cyanotype Process, where it would expose a negative cyanotype photograph directly onto coated paper. It turns out that there are many reasons that this hasn’t taken off as a common technique, but I found the entire process fascinating!

The Chemistry

The Cyanotype process isn’t typically a photographic technique, but rather a printmaking technique developed almost 200 years ago by the famed astronomer (and mathematician, and photographer, etc.) John Herschel. The original formulation, which used ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, could be leveraged to replicate photographic film negatives or create shadow prints of objects placed on sensitized paper and left out in the sun. Upon exposure to ultraviolet light, this combination of chemicals reacts to produce a crystalline material called Iron Ferrocyanide – a pigment known as Prussian Blue.

Interesting side-note: “cyanide” is actually named after the color “cyan” because cyanide-based compounds were first isolated and identified from this cyan-colored pigment.

This process was used to create photographic prints and architectural blueprints until the late 20th century when computers and electronic printers started to win the design/drafting/printing game. More recently, Mike Ware developed a slightly modified formula for photographic printmaking that produces the same pigment by a similar reaction, but exposes much faster and has improved contrast. Since I wanted to use cyanotype in a CAMERA, with very limited light, I opted for this faster chemistry. Ware’s formula is admittedly more difficult to prepare, and somewhat more toxic than the original, but I felt up to the challenge!

The Camera

At its foundation, a camera is nothing more than a guide for light that makes sure light approaching the lens from different sources is focused to points at different locations on a light-sensitive array of pixels or chemicals. In a perfect world, you only need one lens to do this, so in an effort to keep things simple -- and at the expense of image quality -- I bought a variety of cheap three-inch spherical glass lenses and designed a single-lens camera. I used Fusion 360 to block out the camera in 3D and dimension a few 3D-printable brackets, then mounted both the screen and the lens on a large tripod slider so I could easily adjust the focus by watching the projected image and physically moving the entire lens assembly forward and backward.

It’s kind of strange to look away from your subject while lining up the camera, but my viewfinder was just a hole in the side of the shroud, so to line everything up, I’d look at the image on the paper through this gap and it actually worked really well (I sealed it up when I was done).

At some point in the process, I realized that my three-inch lenses weren’t letting enough light into the camera for the extraordinarily slow cyanotype process, and my images were really blurry. I quickly began to understand why modern camera lenses have so many aspheric elements and extremely complex designs.

Because I was trying to project such a large image, the spherical aberration was significant and without cutting down the aperture or adding aspheric elements, I was limited to a strange curved field of focus and significant astigmatism. From an artistic perspective, I think you could do a lot with such a strangely distorted camera, so I tried to look at the bright side, but it really wasn’t all that great.

In the below picture on the right, I just used a digital camera to photograph the image this lens projects onto a sheet of paper -- you can see that while the center is in beautifully sharp focus, the image quality degrades very quickly at high angles.

The camera in this configuration has produced some pretty nice prints, with a lot of detail visible on static subjects like the roof of a house, but significant blurring for mobile objects like trees in wind. These two prints are nice enough that I actually found some 11×15-inch frames and hung them up, but it’s not like they’re digital quality. I love them more for the technical challenge than the actual image quality. Maybe that just means the images are only special to me, but then I’d recommend a project like this to any hands-on maker/photographer so you can produce your own!

Lessons Learned

The best part of building your own stuff is that it’s never truly complete (a bit of a builder's joke here) and the most significant problem with this camera is light gathering. Even using Ware’s fast cyanotype formula, a single exposure takes about a day and that’s extremely limiting in terms of subject matter. If I switch to a larger or faster spherical lens, it just makes the aberration worse. Thankfully, the YouTube comments section has my back, and there are many paths forward I may pursue.

UV Transparency: While I tested the UV-passing capability of a sheet of hardware-store acrylic (1/8-inch cuts about 50 percent), I failed to test the UV transparency of my glass lenses. It’s very possible that my one-day exposure times could be sawed down significantly just by finding a material that passes more UV light, but such a lens is probably a lot more expensive.

Spherical Aberration: Stopping down the camera by placing an annulus on the lens and cutting away a lot of light would improve focus at the expense of exposure time, but maybe with a different lens material, I could get away with it. Alternately, multiple commenters on YouTube recommended (and I have since done some research into) “projector lenses”, cheaply obtainable from projection TVs or literal old overhead transparency projectors from classrooms. Granted in both cases, I may still run into problems with UV. In an experiment that didn’t make it to the camera, I also attempted to curve the paper to match the focal plane, but unfortunately, this still resulted in severe astigmatism.

Multi-step treatment: Another viewer alerted me to the very promising “Cyanotype Rex” chemistry, where the classic cyanotype ingredients are NOT pre-mixed, but instead the paper is only coated with the ferric ammonium citrate and then exposed to light, resulting in a faint image that can be developed by washing with potassium ferricyanide, producing the same Prussian Blue pigment with 2-4 stops less exposure time (great!). This process avoids the self-regulation of the classic formula where the pigment chemicals slow down the reaction by uselessly absorbing UV light.

Simply photograph brighter things: I want to get a lens arrangement which allows for the projection of a larger image so I can photograph the sun. Tracking the sun may prove a challenge for my homebuilt star tracker, but exposures couldn’t get much faster…

Reflective, not refractive elements: The certain way to make sure you’re getting all that sweet ultraviolet light is to not use lenses at all, but instead use curved mirrors like a telescope – if there’s no opportunity for your light to pass THROUGH anything, it can’t get absorbed, right? Unfortunately, this is a tough nut to crack, and the geometries of mirrors you would need are pretty extreme. I’ll say that I’m planning to try, but don’t have high hopes.

So What?

I have had a pile of fun both building and learning to use this camera. Does it produce fantastic quality images? Absolutely not. Does it demonstrate the fundamental challenges of photography in a way I would never have experienced otherwise? Absolutely yes!

There is something immensely satisfying about constructing your own equipment like this, and weirdly enough I feel like I’ve gained significantly more appreciation for my workhorse Sony mirrorless by building something monstrously larger that takes terrible pictures.

If you want to get all the nitty-gritty details (or at least as many as I could cram into a single video), head on over to my YouTube channel and subscribe to catch my new projects! There are a few photography-related videos in the pipeline.

About the author: Dr. Brian Haidet is a materials scientist who dabbles with photography in his spare time, writing custom stacking and distortion scripts for processing astro-timelapses. His work has been featured on PetaPixel before, and NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day twice. His YouTube channel AlphaPhoenix focuses on timelapse photography, physics, astronomy, maker projects, and learning new skills through experimentation.

#editorial #educational #equipment #walkthroughs #analog #brianhaidet #customcamera #cyanocamera #cyanotype #diy #doityourself #film #longexposure