Cheap photography hacks
posted in Gadgets, Photography |Perhaps it’s not surprising that people find the time to post about their neat hacks over the holidays, when they’re snowed in and can’t do anything else anyway. Here are some cool tips for photographers to help save money (in some cases) and improve your picture quality.
After renovating first our townhouse and now working on parts of our house, we’ve collected a large number of those formica samples that you bring home to see how the colours work with your decor. I’ve wondered if there are other things these might be good for, and it appears someone has found one… It turns out you can calibrate the colour temperature on your digital camera if you have the right ones. Note that this won’t be 100% accurate, of course, but at least it would be closer than running uncalibrated, and it’s certainly cheaper than any of the commercial solutions. I’ve ordered mine, it turns out they’re free!
Next, if you don’t mind spending a little money, you could get a lens cap that doubles as a white balance reference. This is an item that looks neat, but i’m not sure if i’d buy one. Probably because i’d need one for each lens I have, and that would get expensive. But if I was always (or mostly) shooting with one lens, I might consider it.
If you still have some of those old film (what’s that?) cannisters sitting around, and if your digital camera happens to have a pop-up flash, you might be able to make a quick-n-dirty flash diffuser.
And finally, a DIY L-Bracket for taking portait photos with a tripod. Many tripods will tilt 90 degrees to allow this, but then your camera is hanging off to one side, and the whole tripod is unbalanced. This will let you keep the camera centered so it won’t fall over as easy.