This camera is a poor man’s large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.
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Photographer Dominique Vankan wanted to play around with the old Autochrome Lumière process from the early 1900s, so he built himself a custom large format camera using LEGO pieces, cardboard, and duct tape.
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Feast your eyes on this gorgeous twin-lens reflex camera that was designed and built from scratch by photographer Kevin Kadooka, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Portland. It uses a Mamiya-Sekor 105mm f/3.5 Chrome lens and has a Polaroid back for shooting 4.25×3.5-inch instant film, and is crafted out of laser-cut birch plywood.
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This might look like a pile of garbage, but it’s actually one of the homemade camera used by photographer Miroslav Tichý from the 1960s until 1985. He made his camera bodies from things he had on hand, including plywood, road asphalt, and thread spools. His lenses would be created from toilet paper tubes with custom lenses created from Plexiglas that had been sanded with sandpaper and then polished with toothpaste and cigarette ashes. For his enlarger, he used sheets of metal, two fence slats, a light bulb, and a tin can. Tichý used his equipment to take thousands of stalker-ish pictures of strangers (mostly women) in the Czech Republic. You can find some of his work here.

(via Flavorwire)

Artists Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs create homemade cameras out of bizarre objects such as turtle shells and large stones. The large format camera above was crafted out of a stack of photography books. Their experiments are documented in a book titled As Long As It Photographs It Must Be a Camera. You can find a recent interview with the artists over at American Photo.

Turning Turtles Into Cameras With Onorato & Krebs (via Photojojo)

Etsy shop soaprepublic sells flexible silicone molds for making homemade soap that’s shaped like a DSLR camera body (with a pancake lens attached?).
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John Sypal of Tokyo Camera Style spotted a photographer on the streets of Tokyo using this homemade lens created out of a potato chip tube. It captures photos that show the world in a glass-like sphere, with everything else blurred.
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Faking toy camera effects with apps or software is a big fad these days, but Joel Pirela of Blue Ant Studio went a step further: he built his own homemade digital Lomography camera using some walnut wood, hand-polished aluminum frame, parts from a 5-megapixel Vivitar Vivicam, and an Olympus OM series lens.
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YouTube user destinw — the guy behind the chicken steadicam (and worth subscribing to) — recently met up with photographer Darren Samuelson and his massive homemade large format camera. In this video, we’re given another look into how this one-of-a-kind camera works, as Samuelson photographs the Saturn V rocket at the US Space and Rocket Center. Check out some of his amazing ultra-large format photos here.

Photographer Darren Samuelson spent seven months building a massive homemade large-format camera that’s about six-feet-long when fully extended. He shoots with 14×36-inch x-ray film that’s about 1/12th the cost of ordinary photographic film but much harder to develop.
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