DIY Cell phone camera rig!

[chill86]

I got tired of almost dropping my cell phone in the water and getting a lot of blurry pics because I shake too much, so I thought about making a sturdy platform from which I can take the infamous top down shot. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one to build one of these, but I still wanted to show it off to my fellow reefers. So here is the pretty simple design, I used 2x48"long 1 1/2" thick pvc, 6" pvc coupling cut in 2, 3" bolts with wing nuts so I can swivel it if needed and a piece of glass caulked to the coupling. I avoided using acrylic or lexan because it scratches so easily.

 

[ngrubich]

It's a pretty cool design :thumbsup:. How do you take pictures near the corners of the tank, though? It looks like you would have a couple feet of PVC hanging over the edge of the tank and / or have to keep the other half of the PVC out of the tank.

If you have access to a router / router table, you could cut a groove into opposite points of the PVC so that you can loosen the wing nuts and slide the glass piece the length of the pipe. Kinda like this: http://cdn.instructables.com/F2M/U9E2/B5XEUBYRCJM/F2MU9E2B5XEUBYRCJM.MEDIUM.jpg

I'm not sure what the dimensions of your tank are, but I think it would be nice to make one that spans the length of the tank and one that spans the width/depth.

 

[chill86]

For corner shots I loosen the nuts and put some angle on it so it can shoot sideways. My tank is 24' wide and 18" long so I need extra length on the legs for when I move it to one or the other side. If the legs where only 24" then they would fall in the water when I try to move it side to side.

 

[chill86]

Here's a few shot I have taken so far. Still messing with it a little. The next one that i make I will use a clear cylinder so there isn't any shaded areas in the shot. Pic taken with wall-mart straight talk 3g smartphone.