Not content with existing vintage and modern cameras, these ten photographers decided to try something new. They set about making new variations of some cameras or completely new ones altogether. Some use traditional methods, while others incorporate technologies like 3D printing. Hats off to all of them for attempting to break the mold and being different. Here are their custom-made cameras.

Han Chen: An Instax Back for the Mamiya RB67

Realizing that no existing product catered to this requirement, Han Chen went about 3D printing an Instax back for his Mamiya RZ67. It took him countless iterations to come up with the final working design.

It’s pretty simple, but there are people who still don’t get it. Zinstax = RZ+Instax.

Han Chen on how he came up with the name for his creation

Sergey Lebedev: custom-made cameras from Driftwood

He firmly believes that a camera can be made from just about anything. But Sergey loves making cameras out of driftwood. He doesn’t intend to stop with just this and has plans to make more cameras from various other materials.

Casey Cavanaugh: An Anamorphic Lens on a Hasselblad 500CM

Doing DIY camera projects is much easier when you’re an expert machinist. Casey Cavanaugh created his custom adapter to attach an anamorphic lens to a Hasselblad 500 C/M. He did this to basically build his own Hasselblad X-Pan.

Markus Hofstaetter: 3D Large Format

Doing crazy and surprising custom camera projects isn’t new to Markus. But his 3D large format wet plate camera setup has to be the best one we’ve seen from him to date. It started with him modifying his existing camera by building two movable lens boards. Read more about this fascinating project in our interview with him. If you’re really into modding and custom-made cameras, this is one really worth looking at.

Bill Hao: More Than Just a Camera

It wasn’t enough for Bill Hao to shoot wet plate photography in his hometown. Wanting to photograph the beauty of Canadian landscapes, Bill now tours Canada with his custom-made cameras and darkroom on wheels. He does this to develop and fix his wet plates while he’s on location itself.

Aleksi Koski

The RF Module by Aleksi is a digital rangefinder compatible with just about any camera. He’s making it easier for large-format photographers to practice their craft by digitalizing the link between the camera and the rangefinder.

Zenji Uehara

While most of the world buys Lensballs and sticks them in front of their lenses, Zenji fixed the biggest problem with this technique – your hand is almost always in the picture. The Soratama set of lens filters arguably produces better photos, in my opinion.

Terry Godlove

What happens when a vintage lens you love isn’t compatible with your modern camera? Terry Godlove didn’t go down the camera mount adapter route. Instead, he tinkered with the mounts themselves to make them compatible with his mirrorless cameras.

Ian Bakke

A lawsuit some decades ago meant that Kodamatic cameras haven’t had usable film for some time now. Ian Bakke feels that photographers need to innovate more to keep older camera tech alive longer. His Instax Adapter breathes new life into these Kodak cameras of yesteryear.

David O’Regan

He’s still in his teens, but photographer David O’Regan has built three cameras for himself already. Putting aside the challenges, David has made a handful of custom-made cameras and lenses to satisfy his large-format cravings.

Bonus: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

I certainly can’t miss adding this one to the list. SLAC in California has made the world’s largest camera for astronomy research purposes. Check out the fantastic sensor they made for this too, in this detailed interview I had with Professor Aaron Roodman of the Dept. of Particle Physics & Astrophysics there.

All images are used with permission and are copyrighted by the respective photographers. The lead image is by Marco Grassi.

Mick Hutson, celebrated music photographer, died on Thursday, 1 June 2023, aged 58. 

Mick was known for his work for Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, Q and Select magazines among others, and he photographed many of the biggest names in music. His pictures were used on official album releases by Nirvana, AC/DC, Primal Scream, Queens of the Stone Age, Mike Oldfield, Judas Priest and more.  

Mick was born in Newcastle in May 1965. He grew up in Aberdeen and when he left school, went to work on the North Sea oil rigs: 12 hours a day, 14 days on, 14 days off. On LinkedIn, he lists his occupation back then as “roughneck”: slang for an unskilled labourer on the drill floor. The Collins dictionary says that a roughneck is someone who is “not gentle or polite and can be violent” – it’s not even close to being a fair description of Mick, who was known for his good humour and charm.

In fact, he once told Digital Camera World magazine that “the real secret of my photography, if there is one, is charm. Charming the PRs into a few more minutes with the band, charming the artist to let me photograph them somewhere other than the hotel corridor, and charming the tour manager to let me stay that little bit longer in the photographers’ pit at a gig. It’s all about constant negotiation.”

He left the oil rigs to do a master’s degree in Photography and Film. “But it didn’t count for anything,” he said later – what really mattered was doing the work. He went to work for the famous music photographer David Redfern (the man Buddy Rich once called “the Cartier-Bresson of jazz”). 

“I learned a lot – a huge amount – in the couple of years I was with him,” he told Primal magazine in a YouTube interview. Striking out on his own, his break came when his sensational pictures of Grace Jones were used in The Sun’s Bizarre column (then edited by Piers Morgan). Suddenly his phone started to ring. “From having no money I ended up making ten grand in two days,” he said. “The next commission I got was from Select magazine to go on tour with U2.” 

His pictures appeared in all of the big music magazines of the time and he became Metal Hammer’s go-to photographer. Chris Ingham worked with Mick for nearly 30 years as Editor and Publisher of Metal Hammer and beyond. “When I was asked to edit Metal Hammer,” he says, “I went on a three-week road trip with Mick, criss-crossing the USA, forging a new look and identity for the magazine in the nu metal era. Mick was the man who made it come true.” 

When the magazine launched the Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards show, it was Mick they turned to: “He thrived on the creative chaos,” says Ingham. 

That chaos included bundling Nikki Sixx, Dimebag Darrell and Ville Valo in the back of a stretch Hummer for a cover shoot, Dimebag and Sixx tossing champagne glasses at Mick as he snapped away. It was Monday and Dimebag had been on a bender since Saturday’s Download festival. 

Jamie Hibbard was Metal Hammer Editor at the time. “I was sitting next to Mick for the whole shoot,” he says, “Nikki throwing champagne flutes at him, Dimebag roaring drunk having been ‘on it’ at Download all weekend, Ville amused and slightly bewildered to be in between the pair of them as they caused as much havoc as possible.

“All the champagne flutes smashed around Mick as he shot – he was laughing the whole time, fully into capturing the unfolding scene before him. The consummate pro.”

Hutson did dozens of cover shoots for Metal Hammer, and many of the shoots became iconic, like this shot of Metallica walking in the middle of the street in downtown Manhattan. It was 2003, St Anger was about to be released and there were tensions in the band.

“Hutson nailed it,” says Chris Ingham. “After the separate headshots for what became known as the Metallica Mk3 cover, Mick challenged the band to get out of the studio and into natural light. ‘You want to put Metallica out on the streets of New York?’ asked Hetfield.”

Mick persuaded them and soon Metallica were walking the streets of Manhattan and attracting crowds.

“Within sixty seconds NYPD appeared on horseback,” says Ingham. “One of them shouted ‘Hey, Metallica, you want me to close the fuckin’ street down?’ He meant it. So did Mick. The cop radioed his mate at the other end of the street and they brought two patrol cars across the top of it and literally closed down NYC.

“Then the shit hit the fan: Horns blared, people stopped their motors dead, a cabbie was jumping up and down on his own car cursing all us ‘assholes’, people leaned out of windows to take photos, shouting, whistling chants of ‘Tallica! Tallica!’”

The famous shot has Lars pointing directly at the camera. He was saying: “Look at all this chaos! It’s all your fault, Mick!”

“Now that’s a moment for the ages,” says Ingham. “Engineered, captured and delivered by a true master of mayhem.”

“Mick was a physical representation of what Metal Hammer strived to be,” says James Isaacs, Art Director of Metal Hammer from 2006-16. “Creative, fun, interesting and surprising. Working with him was never boring and he thrived being in the eye of the storm, right where the action was. 

“When the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards came around, he could always be found holding court in his photo studio, greeting metal legends like old friends, their face lighting up when they saw him. 

“But he was like that with everyone. Not just Robb Flynn or Ozzy or Lars Ulrich, but with every person who was lucky to have met him. I’ll miss him dearly.”

Sarah Hards knew Mick as a teenager (“The Barley Mow Inn, Englefield Green: he was a member of the darts team – I think he’s always had quite a competitive streak”) and went on to work with him for years as Art Editor at Metal Hammer. “Anyone who’s worked with Mick will tell you what a talented, professional, down-to-earth and friendly character he is,” she says. 

“He always went above and beyond to deliver. The attention to detail was meticulous: tracking ambient lighting and camera angles so people looked like they were standing next to each other, even though they were shot on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Always finding superb solutions to complex shots when Photoshop was still in its infancy.”

“We used to go on trips together a lot,” says Jamie Hibbard, “and he was quite an older brother figure to me in my early days at Hammer. He taught me a lot, which had a really positive impact on me in my twenties while travelling America and so on.

“One of the best things he ever taught me – while in Japan with Sum 41 – was to get a local person to write down in Japanese the address of the hotel we were staying in, as being drunk and lost in Tokyo is a bad situation when you can’t even read a street sign.

“Suffice to say, stumbling out of a club one night, this advice saved me and got me home.”

“To me, Mick was a jovial, fun-loving buccaneer,” says Stuart Williams, MD of Music at Future and former publisher of Mojo, Kerrang! and Q magazines. For years, Mick would take the aerial shot of the Glastonbury Festival site for Q magazine that would end up in a special edition sold onsite from Sunday evening. Williams would drive Hutson to the helipad on the edge of the site through hordes of people, craning to see who the VIP being driven around was: “‘Is that Johnny Depp?’ ‘Nah mate, it’s Jay Rayner…’ I remember one saying.” 

The helicopter had the port-side door removed so that the rear seats were exposed to the elements. “At this point, I became the photographer’s assistant,” says Stuart. “Mick was an old hand at this, so he knew how to harness himself in and where to stow his trademark cowboy hat as we took off. 

“I accompanied Mick on this journey six or seven times, I think, and have two standout memories – the time that the pilot hovered in one place for too long until a vortex formed under the helicopter, it lost its lift and we plummeted down 500 feet in seconds before recovering, about a thousand feet over the stone circle. And the time he left his lens cap on the seat, the helicopter banked and out it fell onto the unsuspecting crowd watching Amy Winehouse below.  

“Mick took all this in his stride. Nothing was too wild for Mick – he was a bundle of energy and positivity – and he will be much missed.”

Primal magazine asked him to explain the difference between a great photograph and an ordinary one. “A great photograph is not taken,” he said, “it’s given to you.” And Mick would work hard to win trust and get that gift. 

Classic Rock Editor Sian Llewellyn went with Mick to NYC in 2009 to cover Steel Panther. “The minute we got to our hotel, Mick announced that his top priority before he did anything else was to run to the Levi’s store in Times Square to get a pair of white jeans. This is 2009 so not many people, except maybe the members of Steel Panther, were sporting tight white jeans.

“It was like he was getting into character: Steel Panther were wannabe 80s rockstars, so Mick gave them a relatable 80s photographer look. The shoot went well, so I like to think that Mick’s ‘method acting’ photography paid off.”

Mick could be flash. He liked fast cars and motorbikes (one of his heroes and friends was Eddie Kidd). The cars didn’t always work: He offered to shoot the weddings of two of his mates and, on both occasions, his car broke down and he never made it. Once, booked by Classic Rock to do a cover shoot with Joe Bonamassa, he got involved in a minor accident and missed the shoot by about four hours. 

Photographer Ross Halfin remembers Mick offering to give him a lift from Bristol to London in a yellow Porsche. Zooming down some country road, they got pulled over by the police. Mick turned on the charm. “He was brilliant with them,” says Ross. Eventually one of coppers says, “Where did you get the money for a car like that?” Mick pointed at Ross, who was probably dressed the same way he was and looking as unreliable. ”I work for him,” he said. They let them off. 

“The next time I saw him was in Dubai,” says Halfin. “I was there for Classic Rock doing Velvet Revolver, and Mick was shooting the festival. We sat by the pool all day and he looked great – he had on the tightest pair of Speedos I’ve ever seen. The Adonis of Metal Hammer.”

In 2010 he was part of the Six Shooter exhibition in London, alongside some of music’s top photographers: Roger Sargent, Andy Fallon, Paul Harries, Andy Cotterill and Andy Willsher. “What makes their work different?” The Independent asked him. “We get that extra little thing, which was probably never in the brief,” said Mick. “The magic is a connection between the artist and the musician.”

“He would always, annoyingly, push whatever brief had been placed before him,” says Ingham. “But he always got ‘the’ shot, even if it was one that you hadn’t thought of.”

“Photography is all about control,” Mick told Digital Camera World, “whether it’s controlling the light or controlling the situation with your subjects. Never be scared of trying something new, or chucking the original commission out of the window if it’s not appropriate to the situation. Some of my best pictures have come from tearing the brief up.”

He tore it up all right. When budgets on music magazines shrank, he set up his own gallery, and took up travel photography and reportage, travelling to “post-conflict areas” in an effort to capture the results of conflict and war. He shot child soldiers in Rwanda and travelled with a reporter in Afghanistan. On one of the trips, says Sarah Hards, “they were tracking through mountains when Mick became very ill from a local parasite. He told me he almost died and that it had quite an impact on his outlook. He just grabbed life by the horns.”

Chris Ingham has an even more amazing story: “Did you know that he was kidnapped by Tuaregs on one of his adventures in Africa? Isis came to claim him and the Tuaregs refused to give him up because he’d taken such good photos of their kids.” His charm and his talent had saved his life. The pictures went on display at his short-lived gallery in Bedford.

In his personal life, says Sarah Hards, for all of his reputation as a ‘party boy’, he loved his family and adored his children. “He was brave and made no secrets of his struggle with Bipolar, at a time when mental health still has a stigma attached. 

“There certainly was a big part of Mick that nobody ever saw or understood,” she says. “He was sensitive and spiritual. He shared with me  – and very occasionally on Facebook – some of his poems. He would look for beautiful details in nature often overlooked, capture photos as only Mick could.”

Alexander Milas worked on Metal Hammer from 2006 (leaving his role as Editor in Chief in 2016). “There’s a special bond between photographers and writers,” he says. “You’d meet a stranger in an airport and spend the next 24, 48, or 72 hours in tight quarters. You’d have to be an unimaginative person to not relish the chance to travel around the world while most people are sat at their desks, and Mick Hutson was never unimaginative.

“He was a vagabond and an adventurer at heart, tough as nails, sensitive as could be at times, but he always delivered, and he was never, ever boring.”

He’s left us with some astonishing photography and a whole load of stories. Jamie Hibbard remembers helping Mick set up a makeshift studio in Metal Hammer’s Baker St office to shoot Velvet Revolver’s Scott Weiland. “Scott rocked up in a very tightly-fitting suit and large hat, then asked if there was somewhere he could smoke,” says Jamie. “I took him out to the car park and as we were smoking, he looked down at his crotch and asked: ‘Can you see my cock in this?’

“I inhaled sharply, then muttered: ‘Yes.’

“‘Good,’ he said.

“When we came back up, I told Mick what had happened. He said: ‘You’ve just got to roll with the punches in this game, son.’”

Below are just some of his pictures. Rest in peace, Mick.

At first glance, you may think you recognize some of these iconic photographs. The poses, clothing, and framing seem familiar, but look again. These faces aren’t from history books – they are self-portraits of renowned photographer Samuel Fosso, and they have earned him this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Founded by The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the highly coveted prize began in 1996. Every year, a group of more than 100 international photography experts nominate artists for a recent exhibition or published book in Europe from the 12 months preceding. A jury then awards one artist a £30,000 ($37,000) prize for their significant contributions to contemporary photography.

For Fosso, 60, it was his exhibition at Paris’ Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2022 that placed him in the running. “It was the first time there was a retrospective (exhibition) of all my work. All my artistic work was shown. All my self-portraits were present,” he said.

Known as “the man with a thousand faces,” Fosso has been artistically borrowing identities for over 40 years. From challenging social archetypes with an imagined Black pope to embodying historical figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., it is this performative self-portraiture that caught the jury’s attention.

“Even though his technique is quite simple, and straightforward, and traditional in many senses, it’s really powerful and impactful,” said Shoair Mavlian, director of The Photographers’ Gallery and voting chair for this year’s prize. “His work goes beyond photography and really talks about history and global politics. He’s been interrogating these things for a really long time.”

From humble beginnings to international recognition

Fosso’s self-portraits can be traced back to when he was a teenager. Born in Cameroon, he moved to Nigeria but fled the country as a young boy after the Nigerian-Biafra civil war in 1972, ending up with an uncle in the Central African Republic.

Three years later, at age 13, he began taking photographs for a variety of commercial work, from weddings to graduations, and even portraits of newborn babies.

At the end of the day, with some of his leftover film in the camera, Fosso would dress up and take photos of himself.

“I wanted my (future) children to know how I was when I was a young man,” he said. “And I also sent these photos of myself to my grandmother who was in Nigeria. I was really close to her and wanted to show her how I was evolving.”

Over the years, this practice became explorative. From highlighting African American fashion in his first collection of photographs called “70’s Lifestyle,” to examining oppression and colonization in the 1997 series “Tati,” much of Fosso’s work explores identity politics – garnering worldwide attention.

Embodying “African Spirits”

Though he says he likes all his series, Fosso confessed a special love for “African Spirits.”

In 2008, he dressed up as 14 prominent Black historical figures – from Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah and Malcolm X, to Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis. He studied their photos to mimic their demeanor, their fashion choices, and their poses before impersonating them in front of the camera in his studio.

“It’s never evident, what Black people suffered for independence or during slavery,” said Fosso. “The new generation must know how these people were for us, and what they did for us and even that they were murdered for Black freedom. That is the aim.”

Having exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and more, Fosso is no stranger to the limelight. And yet he was still surprised to receive a call announcing he’s won this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

“It makes me want to continue,” he said, “because people know what I did is important, they’ve confirmed it, they’ve accepted what has been done.”

Samuel Fosso’s award-winning work is currently on display at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until June 11, 2023.