Wiggy's Superguide to inexpensive and creative photography equipment.

My general idea is not just about finding cheap ways of replicating equipment, but using your imagination to achieve unique effects.

Reflectors

Mirror's and Tracing paper:
A good diffuser I find is to use sheet mirrors, cover them in your preferred choice of tracing paper, this allows a nice warm glow.
You can even dye the tracing paper certain shades if you wish to change the glow type.

Want a more portable technique?
Jigsaw roll matt's are sticky matt's ideally used to keep your jigsaw in one piece, though they work well as light reflectors if you stick foil to them, you can then fold them up and are easily transported.

Why spend loads of money on a silver brolly.  Buy a £1 brolly from a pound shop and gaffa tape tinfoil to the inside.  Perfect for a home project. - Thanks Graeme Mather

Car windshield reflectors (the mirrored / Foil kind) easily available from the pound shop double up as good reflectors! - Thanks Nick Eley

Flash Diffusers
A commonly known inexpensive trick for remove the hard light from camera flash's is the use of milk carton parts.

Cut up the handle of the milk carton until you have a piece of plastic big enough to cover your camera flash. Then attach it with your preferred method.
The milk carton plastic helps to remove sharp/hard light in your scene to give it a more natural looking glow.

Another technique is to create flash tubing with beer cans and sheets of packing foam.
I need not explain this as there is a video tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLIGMdxmIc

Foil and numerous other objects can create nice abstract lighting effects if used to diffuse/reflect light.

Colour Gels
A nice and cheap way of achieving coloured flash options without buying expensive flash gels.
http://celticland.com/about/?page_id=281

Lighting

Check here for a great DIY strip light by DIY-photography.
http://www.diyphotography.net/the-diy-strip-light

Lamps.
Of course feel free to use all the lamps around your house to illuminate your shot, you should already have them around your house, thus they are free. Experiment with different coloured bulbs, different bulb watt's and angles to come up with some unique shots.

A nice softlight tutorial with the common Chinese-esque ball lamps.
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/12/cheap-soft-360-degree-light.html

Lens Alternatives

Chris_howell has a good tutorial/thread on creating a macro effect by using a part of an old lens:
Link to thread: Here
Direct link to tutorial: Here

Another DIY lens from Chris_howell this time, a DIY Tilt/shift from
Link to thread: Here

In need of a battery grip?
I do not have a magic way of creating a cheap working battery grip, though I do have a way of creating the grip side of it :p.
Many people enjoy the battery grip simply for shots where they need their camera on their side.
My cheap method for this is to buy a tripod head clip (the bit that you can detach quickly from the tripod), [AKA Quick Release Adapter/platform] you can usually pick these spares up for £4 from ebay.
Once you have the tripod head, cut the right size hole in a piece of wood/plastic then glue the tripod head into the wood/plastic, then attach the camera to the tripod head as you usually would.

Cheap stands
In the world of pre-determined macro photography such as coins/jewellry/water drops your forever needing a way of holding up items.
For example with water drops you need something to hold the water dropper in the air so your free to focus on the camera.

My method:
Drum Cymbal stands, these are great for the price you can get them for, they are available on ebay for £5, admittedly they are not great quality, but they go up, and down and you can change the angle. All you need to do is hang/attach your item to it then put it in place :).

Odd's and ends:

Memory cards:
Look around your house for old phones with the small xD memory cards, these can be used in a transflash SD card so now you have an extra backup memory card! (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcend-2GB-Micro-Transflash-Card/dp/B000MSLW6G)

Use your computer!
Why not use your computer/laptop to automatically store your shots instead of a memory card.
This technique is great for anything that requires little physical movement, such as set-up macro shots (coins/water etc) as you will have a cable running to your PC/Laptop.

The software you will need differs depending on your camera make.

Nikon Cameras Use the "Camera Control Pro". Which unless you know how to "acquire" it costs about £49, which in fairness is the cost of 2 good memory cards.
Using the camera control pro allows you to take control of your camera from your PC via the usb cable, changing any of the settings, then once the picture is taken it is automatically stored on your PCs hard drive.

DIY Bounce card: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=RNCmuExlHvM (thanks Ian Jones)

Cheap/Alternative Backdrop
Aldi/other likely stores sell floor to ceiling adjustable supports which you can use to create a support for your backdrop/drape that take up minimum floor space.

Vinyl flooring, commonly used in bathrooms and kitchens is relatively cheap, and the backside is usually a nice plain white matte, though you can paint it with a coat of white.
As seen in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIoBK2I181g Explanation begins at 2:20
As this flooring is sold for all different size rooms, you can specify your exact dimensions that you need.

Studio clamps
Get yourself to InStores and buy a back of 8 plastic clamps for £2.50.  Perfect for holding up background material, reflectors (tin-foil taped to card is cheap/free), bits of card etc.  You don't even need to clamp them too anything, you can lay them on a table and they will hold card etc upright as a stand. - Thanks to Martin_Hurton

Rain-Cover
http://www.dcmag.co.uk/How_to_make_your_own_rain_cover_for_free.YdSB62Zo39cnPg.html
-Thanks to Dan Rand for pointing this out

Flies getting in your picture?
Put a lump of cheese on the top of your camera - it will keep the flies away from you lens.... - Thanks CannOffice

This site has a whole host of various DIY projects, and the following link goes straight to the photography section (some bits more interesting than others).

http://www.instructables.com/tag/type:id/category:photography/ - Thanks Hevans

Hard Cases
I was in need of a hard case to keep my camera and lenses in, but once I saw the prices in Jessops (£100 and upwards) I decided I could just make my own.

I have no set shops or prices for this, though I would say your budget would be £20.
I had a blue hard case lying around that I got from B&Q in a set of 3 (one smaller, the one I used, and One bigger) for £9.

I then put memory foam into it, cut it to size. Then got a rough idea of how I would place my equipment inside it, then drew around the lenses and camera,  then cut the foam out with a scalpel so the equipment would fit into it.

This is my outcome:


Tripod
I found this tripod in a poundshop in Swansea, it is by no means great quality, or 100% reliable, but for £1 it can come in very handy, I have personally found it very useful for small spaces where my normal tripod can not fit, such as my window sill.



http://www.diyphotography.net/  - A lot of good info on here

Got any cheap top tips?
Feel free to post yours and I will add, and credit them within this list.

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The Best Photographer in the World:
30th-31st August 2008
29th-30th November 2008

Alex-Wigmore.co.uk
My Flickr

Put a lump of cheese on the top of your camera - it will keep the flies away from you lens....

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"Every day is a nice day - if you wake up "
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Added it to the list CannOffice :p.

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The Best Photographer in the World:
30th-31st August 2008
29th-30th November 2008

Alex-Wigmore.co.uk
My Flickr

CannOffice:

Put a lump of cheese on the top of your camera - it will keep the flies away from you lens....

 

Do you have a hotshoe adaptor for that?

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TBPITW 13-14th Sept 08

and how the hell did you find it out

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\-__-/

I tried Jam and Bacon first but they prefer cheese....

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"Every day is a nice day - if you wake up "
My gallery
My Website

The cheese in my fridge wouldn't fit on my Minolta, bloody typical!!

3rd party bags designed for carrying games consoles (ones for the Nintendo gamecube are particulary good ~£5) make good bags for lenses or cameras particulary large ones with battery grips and 300mm lenses on.

On reading this out to my colleagues at work, the suggestion is get one of those Australian hats and replace the corks with cheese, then you reduce the camera shake because there's no extra weight of cheese on the camera!

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Cheers, Sue
Moonlustie's Gallery - Camera Nikon D40
Everyone has a photographic memory. Some, like me, just don't have any film

I like this thread. Stuck.

picstop are doing 4 gig cf cards for £8.99 and 4 gig sdhc for£6.49

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Mick Lord:

picstop are doing 4 gig cf cards for £8.99 and 4 gig sdhc for£6.49

:) Nice.

Ebuyer have a nice 8GB SDHC, CLASS 6! for £13.60.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136210

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The Best Photographer in the World:
30th-31st August 2008
29th-30th November 2008

Alex-Wigmore.co.uk
My Flickr

Can't claim any credit for this, but it should be included...

http://www.dcmag.co.uk/How_to_make_your_own_rain_cover_for_free.YdSB62Zo39cnPg.html

Great idea Wiggy... Some interesting thoughts...!!!!

Lee

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My DCM Gallery

Studio clamps, get yourself to InStores and buy a back of 8 plastic clamps for £2.50.  Perfect for holding up background material, reflectors (tin-foil taped to card is cheap/free), bits of card etc.  You don't even need to clamp them too anything, you can lay them on a table and they will hold card etc upright as a stand.

I find that the cheap compact camera cases from Tesco or Wilkos or wherever (£1-£2) make good storage for chargers and accessories.

Carrier bag - free (unless you shop at M&S), and so many uses.  Kneeling pad on wet ground, temporary rain cover, liner for your not so waterproof bag, fill it with ballast and hang it off your tripod, maybe even use it as a reflector if it's white?

I'll be back with more...

 

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martinhurton.co.uk xtremephoto.co.uk

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http://martinhurton.wordpress.com

Lighting cheapies:

B&Q have plastic clamps that are really strong for a pound each.  They can be used for holding reflectors, umbrella's etc.

Why spend loads of money on a silver brolly.  Buy a £1 brolly from a pound shop and gaffa tape tinfoil to the inside.  Perfect for a home project.

Off camera lighting is expensive if you don't have the right gear.  If you buy a couple of old manual flashes off ebay for a fiver then you can get some small slave cells for about £4 each and fire them off the on-board flash, it works quite well.

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The reason that Santa is so jolly is that he knows where all the bad girls live!!!

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