If you’ve followed the light painting scene, I’m sure the name Hugo Baptista popped up. This creative photographer has shared some of his amazing work with us before. Today, we bring you a simple yet ingenious 3D-printed gizmo he designed to add trippy effects to his photos. It’s cheap and simple, and you can easily do it, too.
Hugo had the idea of using a dichroic cube for his phone photos. He bought an 18mm cube on Aliexpress, and you can find plenty of these cubes on Amazon, too. First, he tested the cube on a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and held the cube with his fingers. It gives some intriguing effects, but it can be tricky to shoot this way. First, you’d constantly have to clean the cube from your fingerprints, which is an issue Hugo encountered as well. Second, Hugo notes that your fingers could possibly occlude interesting reflections from the cube. And if I may add, you’d only have one free hand for holding your phone. As a result, you could end up with some camera shake (at least if you’re anything like me).
Still, the photos turned out interesting, and Hugo kindly shared them with DIYP:
But Hugo wanted to take the things a step further and designed a simple adapter for the cube. This would give him both hands to shoot and stabilize his phone, remove the fingerprints and the interference of his fingers with the reflections. He designed it for the Galaxy S24 Ultra and “designed the adaptor to be able to slide down to be used with the other cameras of the S24 Ultra on top of a silicone case,” as he tells DIYP. However, this is just a first prototype, as Hugo tells us. “I plan on making other versions where I am able to rotate the cube on multiple axis.”
“The great thing about these cubes is that they have two crossed dichroic filters which depending on which orientation they’re held reflect the sides or top/bottom, emulating multiple exposures but in a very colorful way.”
I leave you now to enjoy the trippy photos Hugo took with the adapter and stay tuned for the updates. I invite you to follow his splendid work on his website, Instagram, and Facebook.
