Gadgetory

hey guys welcome to see nuts to fix the show by DIY tech and how to i'm eric franklin and i'm donald bell and if you like taking pictures whether with your smartphone or your DSLR cameras we got some great tips for you guys yeah we're gonna start off with a great DIY project for taking time lapse videos 360 degrees with just your smartphone there are lots of ways to go about shooting a time lapse but if you want yours to stand out from the crowd on instagram and everywhere else on the web why not shoot a panoramic time lapse the setup is really simple using a few household supplies so you'll need a wind-up kitchen timer this one's from ikea and it only costs a few bucks you'll need an l-shaped bracket like this you can pick it up at the hardware store you'll also need some adhesive so i have tape and a command strip you'll see how i use that in a second i'll start by adhering my phone to the l-shaped bracket for that i'm using the command strips so that it comes off easily so i'll put the command strip on one of the sides and stick my phone to it there we go now all i have to do is put this on the kitchen timer and that's where the tape comes in that's your setup it's really that simple when you're ready to shoot your time-lapse you have a lot of options there is an app called laps it which is available for iOS and Android and of course a lot of phones have built in time lapse options but today i'm going to use hyperlapse which is a new app from instagram that lets you shoot up to 45 minutes of raw footage so I've got hyperlapse set up here it's all secured on my kitchen timer so let's go out and shoot this time lapse I really like the hyperlapse app it is by far the easiest to use time lapse photo app that's out there Elsa like that you can slow down your head really slow yes I love the whole sloping it's kind of taken over right now a little bit overused but I still like it alright it's time for a quick break and when we come back we show you how to make an inexpensive camera slider to capture really cool cinematic video shots you welcome back we're all about making diys that are fun useful and affordable and i gotta say i found the inspiration for this next how 2 in my own house I stole toy for my six-year-old son father the early hey it works no I'm excited to see it especially because this one uses a remote-control truck you got yourself a video camera and you're thinking about making your own personal Citizen Kane one thing you should add to your bag of tricks is a dolly shot or a slider shot now this is a kind of shot where you have a stationary camera and instead of panning it left and right you're gonna glide it smoothly to get this shot a lot of the pros use a crane or expensive set of tracks for a dolly rig I'm gonna show you how to make your own DIY solution for under sixty dollars now I've seen some super budget versions of this that you use broomsticks and PVC pipes I'm gonna step it up a little bit and use PVC pipes for our tracks and I'm going to add a camera tripod a flexible one like this and a thirty dollar remote control truck this is the maisto rock crawler and what makes it so awesome is that it's got a little bit of flexibility in the base and these nice big wheels that are set wide apart and this whole thing can actually support a DSLR or you can even use a smartphone with this particular camera mount now these are our bold tires here but they're perfect for fitting over the PVC pipe the grooves in the wheel well they're gonna slide gently just like so now we're going to use a screwdriver to take the truck body off so we have a nice level surface to mount our camera on alright the screws are out and we're going to take off the top and there's this bit of wire here that's the antenna we don't need this there you go all right now we've got a nice level surface for our camera and we've got the wheel wells exposed here at the guy that's on the tracks you can use whatever length or diameter PVC pipe you have around I had this three-quarter inch pipe handy so I'm going to use that now I've got 15 foot section of pipe I'm going to connect these two shorter sections to it using elbow joints next up we're going to take another five foot section of pipe and we're gonna put a slip T joint on it now this is a critical little joint here what's so great about it is that you can slip it over a pipe and you can adjust the gauge of your tracks for exactly what you need now we're going to make this a little fancier by attaching a pulley to one end and using some strings to pull your truck across we're going to drill a small hole and we'll add a nice crew attach the pulley turn the pipe inward so that's facing your truck and then attacked a string to the truck so that we can run that through the pulley alright the next step is to add our camera a flexible tripod mount like a gorillapod gives you a lot of options this one even comes with a phone mount really want to make sure this thing's secure especially if you have a nice expensive camera you don't want to top one down all right now that it's all set up let's take this thing outside and play around with it and see what we can get so mount it up on the table like this here's what the shot looks like the wide base of the truck is strong enough to support a DSLR but I actually had the most fun using this setup and the hyperlapse app on my phone for making smooth time-lapse videos so that's all there is to it that's how to make your own DIY camera slider a lot of fun and as a bonus in your downtime you can use a remote-controlled truck probably the most fun looking do I've ever seen on this channel just because it has the truck ones and also I use a pretty short length of pipe to get the slider going here you can use as long as you want in fact the longer pipe you use the better and cooler the shots going to be awesome now if you're into taking portrait shots you might want to use like a direct light source to add a unique look to these ya a ring lights probably what you want but they can be really expensive so let's see sabinius is going to show us way to make a DIY ring light using tech you probably already have using a ring flash or a ring light is a really great way to get a nice even look for your portraits and also your close-up photography it helps to give a nice shadowless effect on your subjects face and also gives a cool halo effect in their eyes but traditional ring flashes or ring lights can be expensive especially if you only just want to experiment with a technique I'm going to show you how to make your own DIY ring light using tools that you hopefully already have at hand like a big screen monitor or a TV what you'll need is a camera that gives you exposure control a tripod and that big screen that I mentioned you'll also need to make sure that your monitor or TV can display an image on it step 1 download the ring light image from the how-to article on cnet or you can make your own what you'll need is a black background and then on that you'll need to draw a white circle and inside of that a smaller black circle step to display that image on your monitor or TV full screen turn the brightness up all the way you can if the blacks start turning into a bit more of a gray dial the brightness back a bit and boost your contrast step 3 put your camera and tripod in front of the screen in the middle of the center black circle you're going to want to crank up the ISO sensitivity to around 1600 or 3200 because you'll be shooting mostly in the dark turn out all the lights and position your subject right in front of the camera so the ring light is providing all of the light onto your subject to position yourself or the subject you might want to use a camera with a flip-out screen turn on auto focus and then take a few shots trial and error to see exactly where the light is falling the circular ring light works best for the most even look but feel free to do things like triangles squares any other shape you can imagine this DIY ring light isn't exactly the most portable solution out there but it's a great way to get bang for your buck with gear that you already own that's it for this week's show we hope you enjoyed it and we hope we inspired you to go out there and take some great photos if you did you can email us the fixed at cnet com yes you can also tweet us i'm at lido or on twitter I McDonald yeah thanks for watching guys yeah see you next time right here on the fix