Tag Archives: dslr

This Camera Lens Cover comes with a secret compartment for SD cards or an AirTag

Posted on by

Your DSLR may not have Apple FindMy, but the folks at Polar Pro have a clever alternative. Meet the Defender, a camera body cap that fits directly over the lens rim, protecting the sensor inside from damage or exposure to outer elements. Designed to fit on a wide range of models, the Defender isn’t just a protective cover, it comes with a hollow design that lets you stow away essentials including SD cards or even an Apple AirTag. Pop the Defender onto your camera and now not only do you have memory cards available to you at the tip of your fingers, you’ve also got a camera that you can track on your iPhone or any other Apple device. Smart, eh?!

Designer: Polar Pro

The Defender Body Cap comes with a 6061 aluminum outer body, eschewing the plastic construction found on most default camera body caps. The aluminum offers stronger protection, defending your camera from bumps, scratches, and offering much higher protection than flimsy plastic.

The Defender’s secret sauce, however, lies in its inserts that fit into the body cap, allowing you to store items inside the cap’s spacious form factor. Polar Pro offers 3 inserts to choose from – one that holds an AirTag, another that holds 1 SD and 2 MicroSD cards, and a third that holds a CFexpress A card. The caveat, however, is that you can only use 1 insert at a time, which means you can’t simultaneously store an AirTag with an SD card (which feels like a bit of a lost opportunity to be honest), but I’d probably pick an AirTag any day, given that SD cards can easily fit in a wallet.

This nifty feature means your camera’s body cap now has a secondary purpose – hidden storage. The cap fits on Sony, Nikon, and Canon cameras, allowing you to pretty much attach the Defender onto DSLRs, SLRs, Mirrorless cameras, or even full-frame video cameras. Pop an AirTag in and your camera can easily be tracked on your FindMy app, so that if it ever gets misplaced or stolen, you’ll know exactly where it is. Chances are nobody will know the body cap has an AirTag concealed inside it, and anyone who values cameras will know better than to throw the body cap away.

The Polar Pro Defender comes in 3 colors – Black, Desert, and Forest, and ships with all 3 inserts, allowing you to choose what to tuck away in your body cap.

The post This Camera Lens Cover comes with a secret compartment for SD cards or an AirTag first appeared on Yanko Design.

Modified $849 GoPro HERO12 lets you mount Professional DSLR Lenses on your Action Camera

Posted on by

Not many people really appreciate the GoPro for exactly how advanced it is. For a device that small, it boasts a mighty sensor and can capture media in incredibly high resolutions like 5.3K (with image stabilization no less)… but that tiny form factor has one trade-off, the fact that it doesn’t support interchangeable lenses – and, to be honest, that seems like the one thing that makes photographers and videographers not take the GoPro seriously, even though it outputs videos comparable to larger cameras like the ones from RED and Hasselblad.

So what if you could just switch out the GoPro’s fisheye lens for something much more advanced, like some serious DSLR or film camera lenses? Well, the folks at Canada-based Back-Bone managed to hack together a GoPro Hero12 to make it universally compatible with a whole range of DSLR lenses. The Back-Bone H12PRO comes with quite a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. The front features a special mounting armature to load professional camera lenses, giving your GoPro Hero12 the ability to shoot in ultrawide but also telescopic, or even macro, depending on the lenses you’ve got on hand.

Designer: Back-Bone

For the folks at Back-Bone, creating this modified GoPro was about allowing the action camera to achieve its full potential. The GoPro Hero12 is a multimedia beast, capable of shooting 5.3K HDR videos and even stills with its 27MP shooter. For a camera this capable, restricting it to a simple fisheye lens is quite a disservice if you ask me, which is why the modified H12PRO is so compelling.

The H12PRO lets you attach a variety of mounting brackets, giving you the choice between M12, CS, and C-mount lenses. It’s pretty much the same size as the existing GoPro, which means it also supports the company’s Media Mod, allowing you to add extra accessories like directional mics, flashes, etc. The H12PRO also packs GoPro’s Enduro Battery, offering longer battery life, especially in cold conditions.

With the Media Mod and the ability to pretty much attach any kind of lens to your GoPro, the H12PRO gives you the most powerful camera setup that can fit in your pocket. It’s cheaper and smaller than a flagship phone, and shoots higher quality content than cameras twice or thrice its size. The H12PRO has a tripod mount on the bottom, allowing you to attach it to tripods, gimbals, or even small-ish drones with decent payload abilities. Heck, the folks at Back-Bone are also selling an optional Micro Four-Thirds mounting plate to let you attach MFT lenses to your GoPro. If that isn’t the wildest, most brilliant upgrade to the world’s most advanced action camera, I don’t know what is. After all, an action camera is just a camera designed to capture high quality content at a great frame rate, right? So why not exploit its abilities to the max?!

Back-Bone’s H12PRO is available on its website. The $849 kit includes the following:

  • H12PRO modified HERO12 Black camera
  • Aluminum Tripod Mount
  • Original folding GoPro mount
  • Enduro Battery
  • 5mm C-Mount ring
  • M12 to CS adapter
  • M12 locking ring
  • Plastic cap (C-Mount)
  • USB-C Cable
  • Curved adhesive mount
  • Mounting buckle
  • Spare protective glass filter

Understandably, a modified HERO12 won’t be covered under GoPro’s warranty program, but Back-Bone does offer a 6-month repair guarantee against faulty parts or defects, and a zero-labor-cost repair warranty for a year (you just pay for parts and shipping).

The post Modified $849 GoPro HERO12 lets you mount Professional DSLR Lenses on your Action Camera first appeared on Yanko Design.