Photographer Creates Clever Pinhole Headgear to Capture Unique Selfies

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They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But whenever ‘they’ said that, photographer Ignas Kutavicius clearly wasn’t listening. Case in point: he recently decided to take the sublime art of pinhole photography and turn it into a selfie-taking machine… literally.

The Sweden-based artist has created a clever piece of headgear that subjects attach to themselves like a helmet. Once strapped onto their head, the pinhole camera is opened and ready to capture the subject’s face from about arm’s length away.

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Kutavicius described the contraption and project in a bit more detail when we caught up with him over email:

The camera is made of an energy drink can and uses black & white photo paper. It mounts in front of the subject’s face where it has a stable view of their head and creates motion blur of its surroundings. I even ask my subject to move their head slightly around to create the blurring effect in their background. It is one of my craziest projects and from the beginning I didn’t think people would like it, but interest in taking pinhole selfies was high and quite a few people contact me who want to take part in the project.

The results are interesting, giving an almost fisheye perspective at the vignetted edges and presenting a very unique bokeh. Below are just a few images from Kutavicius’ Pinhole Selfies series:

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“The main idea is to combine the primitive technology of photography from the beginning of its history with the modern culture concept of a selfie that is probably the most common photo people take every day,” says Kutavicious. “The result is a fun reflection of what selfies could have looked like at the beginning of the history of photography.”

To keep up with Kutavicius’ photography and see many more pinhole selfies, head on over to his website by clicking here.

(via Visual News)


Image credits: Photographs by Ignas Kutavicius and used with permission

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