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We recently saw this cool post on Craft Chi* about inkjet transfer stamping, and our brains nearly exploded.

“Hmmm,” we thought, “we could use our inkjet printer to mimic rubber stamps, only we could use our own pictures.”

“In fact,” we mused, “we could go beyond plain old stamps and go full-color. Golly Moses,” we postulated, “we could transfer photos onto paper, or wood, or nearly anything, just like Xerox transfers but without the fumes!”

We would have gone on thinking huge and glorious thoughts, except the bus driver got tired of our muttering to ourselves and waving our arms around and kicked us off the bus.

But our humiliation is your gain, sweet reader, because after we walked home, we wrote an image transfer tutorial just for you. Armed only with an inkjet and some copier transparencies, you too can put images on anything you like.

*via Craft!

p.s. Thanks to all our peeps who came to see us at Maker Faire this weekend! We feel so loved.

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Harsh, unflattering flash got you down? Grab an old roll of film and make it all better.

Follow Flickr user natuurplaat’s lead, and turn an old film canister into a flash diffuser! A few strategic cuts make it easy to slip the canister onto your pop-up flash, and voila! Soft, beautiful lighting.

Keep reading and we’ll show you how to make your very own little piece of genius.

Film Canister Flash Diffuser
Thanks to reader Jeff Gamble for the tip!

p.s. Thanks to everybody who sent in book ideas! You rule.

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Wanna know the only phrase we remember from high-school Russian class?
“My pencil is very big and hard.”

This means 2 things:
1. We’re not as mature as we pretend to be.
2. We kinda like pencils.

So we have a pencil project this week!

Wrap some photos around your pencils, and we guarantee you’ll be the coolest kid on your block. (Well, you know, the coolest kid that has photo pencils.)

p.s. Want to design the new Photojojo T-shirt? The winner of our design contest gets a free Eye-Fi, plus a credit and a link when we announce the winner. Check out Pixish for details!

p.p.s. We have new episodes of Donnie’s “You Suck at Photoshop” tutorials. (Remember, some folks might be offended.)

If you could eliminate camera shake using only a pocketful of household items and your foot, how would you do it?

There’s a solution so simple, so elegant, that we can only sum up our feelings about it in haiku:

Farewell, cruel tripod.
I’ll steady my camera
with washers and string.

Serenity now.

$1 String Tripod

$1 String Tripod How-to Video

	We’re hiring! We’re looking for an awesome full-time writer/DIYer in San Francisco to help create the future of Photojojo. If you know someone who lives in San Francisco and would be perfect for us, let ‘em know. (If you refer someone we hire, you’ll get a free Eye-Fi!) Full job listing

You remember that scene where Neo discovers he can dodge bullets, and the whole world slows down and he just sort of waves his arms, leans back, and the bullets whiz by him?

So ace.

Anyway, that bullet-time scene required custom contraptions, millions of dollars, and a slew of cameras to pull off. And now you can do it at home.

Before you get too excited, you should know that it’s still pretty darn pricey. Like $5-8,000 pricey. But hey, it’s WAY cheaper than it costs to rent one of these time-slicing rigs ($100K/day), and it’s one of the few ways to live out your fantasies of being The One.

Check out the complete tutorial by the cats at the Graffiti Research Lab or just check out their homemade bullet-time video.

Instructables DIY Bullet-time Tutorial

We’ve always wanted to live in a fish tank. There – we said it!

So we have odd ambitions. At least with the DIY Fisheye Lens, we’re (kinda) there. With it, we can give our photos that wonderfully distorted “fisheye” perspective – the one we’d like to think fish see everything from.

Best of all, we’re making the DIY Fisheye Lens with nothing more than some tape and a lens from a pair of old eyeglasses.

So join us in our blissful underwater world, by making your own!

(Put your fins together for Melissa Lawson, the wonderful creator of the DIY Fisheye Lens, who’s sharing it with us today!)

p.s. Something new we’ve been working on: CommandShift3.com.

One of our favorite words as photo-loving folk is the word “Bokeh.”

Not only is it fun to say, but “Bokeh” adds incredible depth and interest to our photos – creating blurred, out-of-focus areas in them (”the Fuzzy”, we like to say) that can change a regular ol’ snapshot into a photograph.

We just found a tutorial that helps you shape the Fuzzy into different shapes – stars, hearts, butterflies… Imagine how cool it is to see hearts appear in your portraits, almost magically!

It’s actually easier than you think – simply make a fake lens hood from black construction paper, then cut a hole out of it in the shape you’d like. When light reaches your lens through the shaped hole, it’ll then take on that shape – whether its a star or a heart or whatever!

We feel like a giant anvil just fell on us from the sky, ala a Looney Tunes cartoon – we’re seeing stars everywhere with our photos now. We love it!

Create Your Own Bokeh

Don’t miss the six best ways to use this technique in your photos. Photo by joy_sale.

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Boy, if we only knew what dogs went through.

Our canine compadres always seem to get the short end of the bone in life, so that’s why we’re inventing a Photojojo first: The Doggie-Cam.

By sticking a camera on our four-legged friend Molly, we’ll finally see the world as she sees it, and maybe then we’ll be able to sympathize. No more doggie disrespect!

Who knows, after this we might just start lobbying for dogs’ rights – Dogs deserve to vote, we think. And where’s all the doggie mayors? Well, we’ll change that. The 2008 presidential elections? We’re talkin’ third-party dog candidate, baby. Before you know it, dogs will be in positions of power everywhere – dogs could rule the world!

Whoa, Nelly. So we might not go that far. But sometimes, we think it’s worth it to look at life from the underdog’s point-of-view – and with the Doggie-Cam, now we can.

p.s. Help us out, Digg this tutorial!

(Thanks to reader Wayne Pyle for pointing us to what we should admit is the first doggie cam, and hooking us on this idea.)

Linus is sure somebody to sympathize with.

Brimming with childlike faith and optimism, his belief in the Great Pumpkin never falters — Every year Linus waits to catch a glimpse of the Great Pumpkin on Halloween, but every year he just misses it.

Man, we feel for him.

If pumpkin cheer is a bit elusive in your life right now, too, we’ve found the perfect something to make up for it — DIY Pumpkin Photo Holders. Putting ‘em together couldn’t be simpler:

Step 1: Get a pumpkin
Rescue a gentle gourd from your nearest pumpkin patch, grocery store, or the shady-looking guy on the side of the road.

Step 2: Pound some nails all around
With your trusty hammer, tap small nails in (not quite all the way!) around the top of your pumpkin, about an inch apart. Alternate between the top row and another row slightly below it, to offset your nails – all the way around you go now. Repeat along the bottom of your pumpkin.

Step 3: Thread string in-between
Thread some thin string between your nails to finish things! Try alternating colors – dark on the outside nails, light on the inside ones. Play with patterns. Experiment to see what you like.

Step 4: Insert photos, show off!
Plop your pumpkin in the middle of the table, stick some photos behind the string so they hug the pumpkin, and marvel longingly as you wait for the Great Pumpkin to appear.*

Thanks to reader Camille for this great tip. That’s her photo up above too!

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Our friend Judy runs a one-woman shop making the most beautiful handmade journals we’ve ever seen.

Naturally, when we saw the photographs she used for her covers, we ran straight to her apartment, video camera in hand.

So today we’ve got two special treats for you:

1) A how-to video of Judy showing you how you can make your own perfect-bound journal using two 4×6 photos for the cover, some paper, glue, and a few other tools.

2) Two special edition journals made with pages of sugarcane fiber and reclaimed paper by Judy herself. Created for writers, illustrators, artist and designers, her notebooks have unique features like an inner pocket for looseleaf notes and a spine that opens flat for writing or drawing across the pages. Exclusive designs on the Photojojo Store for a limited time. Buy now

p.s. Help us out, Digg this tutorial!