solutions hardWARE
fish-eye view Attach a $15 door peephole from a home supply store to an old camera, and presto, you have a fish-eye lens.
To attach the peephole you need some type of permanent mount on the camera. This is where having an older camera can be better. If your camera doesn’t have a screw thread you’ll need to tape a piece of PVC tubing or a bottle cap of some kind onto your camera and then tape the peephole onto it. My Nikon Coolpix 880 has a screw thread, and for $5 I was able to buy a threaded adapter that worked nicely with my $15 ultrawide door viewer. Once the “fish-eye” is added, the camera will have a huge field of view—much wider than you can normally get with the camera itself—and it gains that unmistakable fish-eye effect. I found I needed to crop images a bit after taking them, as the door viewer didn’t cover the entirety of the 880’s lens. The key to getting reasonable fish-eye images is to buy as wide a door viewer as you can find. The $15 version I bought covered most of the field of view of the lens on my Coolpix 880. You need to keep the door viewer out of the way of the lens when it extends, either by using a screw-in tube like the Nikon extender I purchased for $5 or a short piece of PVC tubing attached with tape. (Now you can probably see why you’d want to use an older camera for this project.) You get a very wide field of view with your home-built fish-eye, but you’ll need to tinker with your camera’s settings to get 46 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION MARCH 2009
your subjects in focus. Experiment with zooming in and with the macro mode, if your camera has one. Remember to turn off your built-in flash, as it will be blocked by the door viewer. Do-It-Yourself Webcam Are you jealous of your friends’ new laptops with built-in webcams but reluctant to invest the extra money in yours to add one? The good news is that you can use
an old point-and-shoot digital camera as a webcam. All you need is a camera with video output and a way to get the video into your computer. Your old point-andshoot probably has an A/V-out port and a cable that lets you output to a TV. If your computer already has a video input—many do, particularly ones marketed as media PCs—then you’re all set: You can just plug the camera into your computer and turn on the camera.
a WEBCam in minutes An old Canon PowerShot serves as a more than able webcam.
