(Set aside a weekend to study up on the guides before you attempt.) If the inner MacGyver in you is up for some tinkering – and you happen to own a Canon camera, in particular – here are some hacks that will unlock your camera’s hidden potential and add extra value. While cameras are often already loaded with features, software-based hacks can add new shooting capabilities not mentioned in the instruction manual. This image from space was taken by a Canon PowerShot camera hacked with CHDK. And hacking the camera might actually be the easy part, thanks to an open-source firmware update. While it sounds like a complicated science project, it’s actually something many have successfully accomplished (Ho and Muhammad just made theirs unique by sending the little Lego guy with it and, oh, they’re teens). To document the event from liftoff to crash-land, they rigged a basic Canon point-and-shoot camera to continuously snap photos. Last year, two Canadian teenagers, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, successfully sent a Lego mini figure up into space using a weather balloon as the vehicle.

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