Tearing Down a Darkroom Relic for Buried Treasure
If your goal is to harvest unique parts from defunct devices, the further back in time you go, the better the pickings stand to be. At least that’s what [Kerry Wong] discovered during his tear-down of...
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Shutter Bug Goes Extreme with Scratch-Built Film Camera
Should a camera build start with a sand mold and molten aluminum? That’s the route [CroppedCamera] took with this thoroughly impressive camera project. When we think of cameras these days, chances are...
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The Photo Lab That Flew to the Moon
When planning a trip by car these days, it’s pretty much standard practice to spin up an image of your destination in Google Maps and get an idea of what you’re in for when you get there. What kind of...
View ArticleMaking Microfluidics Simpler With Shrinky Dinks
It’s as if the go-to analogy these days for anything technical is, “It’s like a series of tubes.” Explanations thus based work better for some things than others, and even when the comparison is apt...
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Retrotechtacular: Balloons Go to War
To the average person, the application of balloon technology pretty much begins and ends with birthday parties. The Hackaday reader might be able to expand on that a bit, as we’ve covered several...
View Article3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back to Life
There is a treasure trove of history locked away in closets and attics, where old shoeboxes hold reels of movie film shot by amateur cinematographers. They captured children’s first steps, family...
View Article[Ben Krasnow] Looks Inside Film Camera Date Stamping
Honestly, we never wondered how those old film cameras used to put the date stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Luckily, [Ben Krasnow] does not suffer from this deplorable lack of...
View ArticleFoam Board, Old Electronics, and Imagination Make Movie Magic
When it comes to building sets and props for movies and TV, it’s so easy to get science fiction wrong – particularly with low-budget productions. It must be tempting for the set department to fall back...
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Film Negative Viewer Has Many Positives
Not so long ago, taking pictures was a much more sacred thing. Film and processing were expensive compared to the digital way, and since you couldn’t just delete a picture off the camera and get your...
View Article[Ben Krasnow] Rolls Old School Camera Out for Photolithography
In a time when cameras have been reduced to microchips, it’s ironic that the old view camera, with its bellows and black cloth draped over the viewscreen for focusing, endures as an icon for...
View ArticleClassic Leica Film Camera Turns Digital
While there’s still a market for older analog devices such as vinyl records, clocks, and vacuum-tube-powered radio transmitters, a large fraction of these things have become largely digital over the...
View ArticleStart Printing From Film For Around £100
For the vast majority of readers, the act of taking a photograph will mean reaching for a mobile phone, or for a subset of you picking up a digital camera. A very small number of you will still use...
View ArticleMake Your Own Microdot
If you spent your youth watching James Bond or similar movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, then you may be familiar with a microdot as a top-secret piece of spy equipment, usually revealed as having...
View ArticleThe CIA’s Corona Project was about Satellites, Not a Virus
We take orbital imagery for granted these days, but there was a time that it was high technology and highly secretive. [Scott Manley] has a good overview of the CIA’s Corona spy satellites, along with...
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E-Paper Display Shows Movies Very, Very Slowly
How much would you enjoy a movie that took months to finish? We suppose it would very much depend on the film; the current batch of films from the Star Wars franchise are quite long enough as they are,...
View ArticleListening To Long Forgotten Voices: An Optical Audio Decoder For 16 mm Film
Like many of us, [Emily] found herself on COVID-19 lockdown over the summer. To make the most of her time in isolation, she put together an optical audio decoder for old 16 mm film, built using modern...
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Movie Magic Hack Chat
Join us on Wednesday, January 20th at noon Pacific for the Movie Magic Hack Chat with Alan McFarland! If they were magically transported ahead in time, the moviegoers of the past would likely not know...
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Imaging The past With Time-Travel Rephotography
Have you ever noticed that people in old photographs looks a bit weird? Deep wrinkles, sunken cheeks, and exaggerated blemishes are commonplace in photos taken up to the early 20th century. Surely not...
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Recreating the Intercom from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a pop culture classic, and remains one of the standout teen films of the era. Notably, titular character Ferris was somewhat of a hacker himself, with the movie showcasing...
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Analog Camera Goes Digital
The digital camera revolution swept through the world in the early 2000s, and aside from some unique situations and a handful of artists still using film, almost everyone has switched over to digital...
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