DIY

As photographers, most of us are programmed to love gear. We dream of bags filled to the brim with enough accessories to fill a B+H catalog. The problem is that those accessories can be as expensive as they are useful and often they only fulfill a somewhat limited purpose. But accessories don’t have to be exotic or cost a lot to get the job done and with a little freethinking, you can turn lead into gold.

There are plenty of DIY camera mods out there, but this is the first time we have ever seen anyone create their own radiation detector. Lathrop's technique involves covering a couple of layers of scintillator in a reflective material, placing them in front of the camera's lens, and then light sealing it to the best of your ability. Scintillators are materials that when hit by radiation, they luminesce. In other words, when hit by invisible radioactive particles they emit visible light.

Many of us "photo-nerds," have fond memories of that very first high school or middle school photo class where we brought in a Quaker Oats can from home and made a rudimentary pinhole camera.Designer Kelly Angood has taken the cardboard pinhole camera concept to a whole new level, creating a functionig Hasselblad replica out of plain old cardboard. Not only is Kelly's creation a true to size replica of a 'blad, but it was even screen printed on to give it a more realistic look. The camera takes standard 120mm film.