at Work

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

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.

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.

If your computer doesn’t have a video input, you can buy an inexpensive USB capture device for $5 to $10 on eBay, or a brand-new EasyCap Video Capture Adapter for $15. The same device can let you watch TV on your computer, too, since the encoding hardware is the same—look for a TVtuner-plus-video-capture USB adapter for $30 to $50 instead. You’ll need to install the driver that comes with the device, but not the video-editing software. Simply run your favorite IM client; with the capture device’s driver installed the IM client should find your camera and let you use it as your webcam for videoconferences. I hooked up my old Canon PowerShot to a desktop PC using a $15 video-capture dongle and ran Microsoft Live Messenger, selecting the video device as my input. I was videoconferencing within minutes. With some cameras the audio will be sent along with the video. If that’s not the case with yours, set your computer’s audio input to its microphone. For convenience I also used a GorillaPod screwed into the base of my old PowerShot to let the camera perch nicely on my LCD for conferencing use. You’ll want to disable the auto-shutoff so that your camera will stay on during longer calls. The one I tested ran for several hours on its battery, but if you use it a lot, consider plugging your camera in to its power adapter.

daredevil bicycle Camera

Do you wish you could better impress your friends with death-defying tales of careening down your favorite hill on your mountain bike or around those S-curves on your motorcycle? Sure, we all do. What if you could illustrate your story with a video? Creating a bike camera is a perfect use for that old digital camera you have lying around. It can probably capture video, and you won’t be as concerned about smashing it as you were before it was relegated to your closet. All you need is a simple handlebar mount, which you can make with about $3 worth of parts from any home supply store. The mount is built from a simple T-shaped piece of 3/4-inch PVC pipe, cut in half and attached to your handlebars with a pair of hose clamps. I also used some inexpensive compression fittings to help cushion the mount and absorb shock. (All can be found in the garden section of your home supply store.) The other piece of the mount is a PVC end cap with a hole drilled through it and a lengthy quarter-inch bolt fastened pointing up through the hole. You’ll want to make sure the bolt has 20 threads per inch to match the standard for tripod sockets. Once you have the T piece clamped to your handlebars, simply screw in the end cap (with the bolt inserted) and then screw the camera to the mount using its tripod socket. I used two nuts so that one would hold the bolt to the bicycle while I could use the other to tighten the camera facing forward. And if you have large tube handlebars, use 1-inch PVC pipe instead of 3/4-inch. I mounted an old Nikon Coolpix 880 to my daughter’s bicycle, and it handily captures video and stills of her rides. Make sure not to crimp your gear or brake cables when you mount the camera on your handlebars. We had to trim our PVC T piece so that it would fit cleanly on the exposed area of the handlebar. The simplest way to use the camera is to shoot video, so you can simply start recording and riding. If you want to take still photos, you’ll need either to chance a quick press with your finger or to use a remote release, which you can wire to your hand grip.

bonus l TiMe-LAPSe “SPy” CAM One of the cool things about setting your digicam to operate as a webcam is the free software available online, which can turn it into a remotely operated or time-lapse camera to monitor any location where you can put a computer. i used yawcam and found it fully featured and simple to install. The software even includes a motiondetector capability that can trigger recording whenever the camera’s sensor detects motion. instAnt thrill CAm you can easily capture video and stills of bike rides by attaching an old camera (in this case, a Nikon Coolpix 880) to the handlebars.