Category: Tips and Tricks
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The No. 2A Folding Pocket Brownie: still going strong after 105 years
I have most of my collection of 100-plus cameras on a couple of shelves made from old Indian doors whose multiple layers of paint was peeling. By collector standards it’s not many, but it’s enough so that they grab your attention when you walk into the room. Eventually they ask, “Do any of them still work?”…
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Red Shutter Leica: To Repair or Not to Repair?
Hundreds of dollars spent on a collectible vintage Leica, and it doesn’t work. What to do? Naturally, take it apart! This is the camera I picked up on eBay. it’s a Leica IIIc, made in 1941. I thought I’d gotten a pretty good deal – my McKeown’s guide lists this particular model as being worth…
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Make Your Own 3-D Camera!
I was checking out the latest copy of Photo-Era Magazine (the latest I own, anyway) – dated April, 1929 – here’s the cover: It’s chock full of interesting articles on photography – and ads for the latest cameras, including this ad for an unfortunately named Voigtlander. One of the articles that caught my attention was…
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Vintage: Testing the Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A
If you’re at all interested in my occasional posts about trying to make old cameras work, read on – this one is the oldest one yet. The Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A was manufactured in London around 1912, and is gigantic by modern standards, at about a foot tall, 4 1/2 inches wide, and a…
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Hack Your Brain: Mrs. McKinley in 3D
I have an old Holmes stereoscope that dates from around 1900 or so. What’s a stereoscope? It’s a device that allowed you to look at two side-by-side photographs in such a way that the image appeared to be in 3 dimensions. This is not new technology. The earliest stereoscopes date from the 1830s. They were…
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Testing the Agfa Silette Rapid F
When I’m considering vintage cameras for purchase, I specifically look for cameras that still appear to work, and for which film can still be acquired somehow. Then, periodically, I grab a couple and test them out. This week, it’s the Agfa Silette Rapid F. This is actually one of the first cameras I acquired; when…
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Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) Focusing Woes
The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) is a cleverly-designed little camera from the late 1940s and early 1950s that fits in your pocket and is easy and fun to use. In fact, after World War II, this German-manufactured camera became a hit with GIs stationed in Germany as it was sold in military PXes. The…
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Elgato Video Capture Solves the FireWire-USB Dilemma
I’ve got stacks of 8mm and “Hi8” video recordings going all the way back to 1990 when I bought my first camcorder to capture all the adventures my young wife and I were about to undertake. Locked somewhere in those plastic cases holding spool after spool of magnetic tape were memories of a 23-year-old Army…
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Making Ordinary Photos Panoramic
Sometimes I wish I had one of those fancy panoramic photos where you can capture the full breadth of something – usually the horizon – don’t you? Well, it turns out that with today’s high-resolution digital cameras, you can easily turn an ordinary photo into a panoramic. With a little planning beforehand. See something that…
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Wildlife through a Loupe – Micro goes Macro
For my latest video, I noticed I had gradually been collecting random footage of “micro-wildlife” I have come across while working in my new garden here in Windhoek. One of the creatures I had been continually running across is the millipede. These guys are everywhere, coiled up under the soil, perhaps waiting for cool weather…
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Music mashup using video editing software
So while it may appear obvious to others, it turns out you can use video editing software to create music mashups. I had noticed the similarity between certain tunes and wanted to give this a try, but couldn’t bring myself to navigate the learning curve required to learn music editing software. So I took some…
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Chroma Keying Made Easy Part 3 of 3
So in part 1 I talked about the basics and how you can “green screen” for very little money…and then in part 2, a couple of ways you could superimpose multiple “green screen” or “chroma key” elements on top of each other. In part 3, we’re going to kick it up yet another notch, and…
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Chroma-Keying Made Easy, part 2 of 3
The previous post talked about how to use chroma keying (blue-screen/green-screen) techniques in home video, relatively inexpensively. The question is, so now what can you do with that? Really, it’s up to you and your imagination. The most obvious use is to put yourself in front of a background which, for practical reasons, is difficult…
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“Green Screen” Cheap and Easy
Most people who dabble in home video editing know about “blue-screening” or “green-screening.” What they may not realize is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of money – or a great deal of know-how – to apply the technique in their own videos. Technically called “chroma keying,” the technique actually allows you to filter…
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Sky and Sea Videos – Pitfalls to Avoid
The other day I was working on a home video of a recent vacation to Egypt, and I invited my 12-year-old to a pre-screening of my near-final draft (a shorter version here), and she told me it was all wrong. “Why?” I asked, horrified. “Your horizons are all crooked.” And she was right. I had…
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Kris Allen performs
American Idol winner Kris Allen came to town. Kinda cool – he’s supporting the USO, and he gave a performance in our small community in the Netherlands – for free – to support servicemen and women and their families. I have 3 things to say about that. Part 1: Lesson learned – I should have…
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Easy Ways to Improve Sound in Your Videos
You could go out and spend a wad of cash on all the latest high-tech sound recording equipment money can buy. Or you can do some easy things that will go a long way toward improving the sound quality of your videos: – invest in an external microphone – it doesn’t have to be a…
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The Blackbirds Came Back – Wildlife Videography
I was pretty excited about the opportunity to do a little more “wildlife photography” in my back yard. The blackbird pair that I featured in the video “Learning to Fly” came back for another brood. I saw one of them fly into the ivy that climbs one side of our house and grabbed a closer…
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Telling a story in video
The cool thing about all this technology is that now anyone can create just about anything and share it with everyone else. Most of it goes unnoticed by the vast majority, but that’s not why most of us create. Most of us create out of some intrinsic desire to imagine, to create, to make something…
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Easy Flip Camera Lens Repair
In case anyone other than me has cracked the lens of their Flip camera (or one of its close cousins – it would probably work for them as well) here’s how I fixed mine after it had an unfortunate encounter with a curious cat and a stone floor 3 feet below. It turns out the…
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Recording Live Concert Footage
When I was a kid, often you couldn’t take a camera into a music concert – probably they wanted to make sure they had the market cornered on posters and publicity photos back then. Now, in the days of ubiquitous mobile phones and pocket camcorders people are not only sharing photos, they are sharing music…
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Army Peer-to-Peer Safety Video Contest
Good news and bad news – my entry to the US Army Combat Readiness / Safety Center’s video contest was approved, but so were a load of others! The contest has been running since October, but like most video contests, most of the entries will be rolling in close to the 30 April deadline. So…