Ever used your iPhone to take a photo through the viewfinder of your camera? Or tried to line up the iPhone’s lens with one half of a pair of binoculars? Then you’ll know how hard it is to get a good result. But if you’re willing to sacrifice an old iPhone case and pony up a few dollars for an SLR eyepiece, then you can make an adapter that’ll get you great Instagrammatical pictures every time.
Many SLRs shipped with a cover for the eyepiece, designed to slip over and block off the viewfinder while you used the camera on a tripod. This would stop light entering through the back door and affecting the exposure meter.
There are also clip-on eyepieces with rubber rims to make it easier to use the camera whilst wearing specs.
However you get ahold of your eyepiece, you should just glue it over the camera hole of an old iPhone case, making sure to get the aspect ratio correct. Once the glue has set, you can then clip the iPhone onto the back of your camera and snap photos through its lens.
What you’re actually doing is snapping a picture of the focusing screen inside the camera’s pentaprism housing, so you’ll also get any markings that are present, but that just adds to the charm. You might also want to choose a manual focussing app because once you’ve focused on the screen, you’re done. Only the camera needs to be focused on the scene in front of you, not the phone.
This could also work using binoculars. In fact it could be even easier as you can use the lens cap off one of the eyepieces as the adapter, which will have also cut out all stray light coming in from the sides and lowering the contrast.
Source: PetaPixel
Source: Flickr
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
One response to “Take iPhone Photos With Your SLR Using This DIY Adapter”
Unless you’re talking about an SLR film camera, and not a DSLR digital SLR camera, this is stupid. Why destroy an iPhone case and an eyepiece adapter to get an inferior picture through the viewfinder. You’d be bypassing any of the SLRs superior image processing abilities and better image sensor qualities and noise reduction, etc, when you could for about the same money just get an apple camera connection kit, attach it to your iphone and import it. Using an iphones tiny lens to shoot through an SLRs viewfinder, and superior lens is just stupid when you’ve got an SLR within reach. Its like filling a glass of water from your tap then using an eyedropper to put it in your mouth drop by drop. Why make the process more difficult for crappier results.