Previously trapped inside broken Wayback Machine Concrete5 dumps in /salvaged/ and unlinked folders in /diy/—here are all of Dylan's 2008–2012 camera modifications, acoustic hard-drive record players, kite aerial rigs, and Veroboard circuits, restored with clean HTML5 media and original build photos.
Coercing £5 surveillance lenses, tin-foil pinholes, and backwards 50mm primes into shooting swirly portraits and insect compound eyes.
Cheap 25mm f/1.4 C-mount CCTV lenses produce gorgeous, Petzval-like swirly bokeh on Micro Four Thirds sensors—if you can get the rear element close enough to focus to infinity. When a standard C-mount adapter wouldn't seat deep enough, the solution was taking a hacksaw to the lens barrel, filing down the rear shroud, and epoxying the optics directly into a recessed mount for the Olympus E-PL1.
Drilling a spare plastic camera body cap, shielding the interior with matte black tape and a pierced foil shim (~0.25mm aperture), and shooting dreamy, infinite-depth-of-field pinhole exposures directly onto a digital sensor.
By mounting an old manual 58mm prime lens backwards onto the front filter thread of a standard zoom lens using a macro coupling ring, the reversed prime acts as a high-magnification, multi-element close-up diopter—capturing individual facets of a fly's compound eye, live ants, and poppy seeds with razor-thin depth of field.
What do you do with a dead 3.5-inch hard disk drive and an old 7-inch vinyl single? Use the precision fluid-bearing spindle platter as a manual flywheel turntable, tape a sewing pin to the tip of a rolled paper cone, and play vinyl records purely acoustically with zero electricity.
A custom Veroboard (stripboard) track and wiring layout for Jay Silver's Drawdio circuit—mounting a 555 timer oscillator, miniature speaker, and AAA battery directly onto a graphite pencil so that drawing lines on paper forms a variable-resistance audio synthesizer loop through your fingertips.
Loading the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) onto a pocket Canon PowerShot A530 to run custom BASIC intervalometer scripts, exposure bracketing, and kite-suspended aerial photography.
Long before quadcopters were commonplace: running a custom BASIC intervalometer script inside CHDK firmware on a budget Canon compact camera, strapping it to a stunt kite line, and launching it over parks and beaches.
The original /diy/chdk/ pages used legacy Shockwave Flash <object> tags that no longer render in modern browsers. Rescued here are the original YouTube uploads: CHDK intervalometer cloud time-lapses, stop-motion animation, and vibrating toothbrush-head BristleBots.
Stripping the lenses off cheap USB webcams to couple bare CMOS/CCD sensors directly to microscope eyepieces and backyard telescopes.
Converting an old toy microscope with custom white-LED sub-stage illumination, polarising filters, and a lensless USB webcam mounted in a 35mm film canister—capturing red onion cells, root cross-sections, and birefringent vitamin C crystals.
Early long-exposure night-sky captures of the Orion Nebula (M42), the Pleiades open cluster (M45), and Ursa Major (The Plough) rescued from the unlinked /diy/astrophotos/ directory.
