pinhole

Michael Zhang

Concept Ilford Film Package Doubles as a Twin-Lens Reflex Pinhole Camera

Film usually comes in pretty boring boxes, but what if you could reuse those boxes as a pinhole camera? Designer Linna Xu won the Packaging category of the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards with this concept, creating these awesome boxes for Ilford medium format film that double as pinhole cameras resembling old school twin-lens reflex cameras. Each box allows users to explore the world of medium format photography without even having a medium format camera!

Michael Zhang

Bored at Work, Engineer Builds a Camera Out of Trash

Mechanical engineer and Flickr user Some Guy (Art) was bored at his job where picture taking was explicitly disallowed, so he did what any rebellious photo-fanatic would do: build a makeshift camera out of trash! Bringing $5 worth of parts (e.g. dowels, bolts, super glue) from home, he successfully turned some machine core -- which he calls "cardboard toilet paper tube on steroids" -- into a 35mm pinhole camera.

Michael Zhang

Photographer Uses Mouth as a Camera

For her series titled Face to Face, photographer Ann Hamilton placed a pinhole camera in her mouth and shot photographs by simply opening her mouth at people. Upon first glance, the view almost looks like you're looking out someone's eye.

Michael Zhang

P.90: The Rolls Royce of Pinhole Cameras

The P.90 is a limited edition pinhole camera by Kurt Mottweiler, an Oregon-based builder of wooden cameras. It's constructed using Cherry wood and brass, has a tripod adapter on the bottom, and is loaded with 120 roll film.

Michael Zhang

World’s Largest Camera Big Enough to Hold an Airplane

What you see above is the inside of the world's largest pinhole camera measuring 45x160x80 feet. It's an abandoned airplane hangar in Irvine, California that was converted over the course of two months into a gigantic pinhole camera. 24,000 square feet of plastic, 1,300 gallons of foam filler, 1.52 miles of tape, and 40 cans of spray paint went into darkening the hangar.

Michael Zhang

Pinhole Camera Made from a Pine Nut

Transforming foods into pinhole cameras appears to be one of the popular trends. We already shared the egg pinhole camera, and now here's the pine nut pinhole camera. Italian photography student Francesco Capponi created this tiny camera by painting the inside of the shell black, poking a hole in one side, loading it with a piece of photographic paper, and using his thumb as a shutter. He calls it the "PinHolo", a play on words since "pinolo" is Italian for "pine nut".

Michael Zhang

Build Your Own Working Cardboard Hasselblad Pinhole Camera

You can now build you own version of the cardboard Hasselblad pinhole camera that we featured a couple days ago. Kelly Angood has released a PDF with the template and detailed instructions for putting the pieces together. The finished product is a working pinhole camera that takes 120 35mm film.

Michael Zhang

Pinhole Cameras Made with Photo Paper

Photographer Thomas Hudson Reeve shoots pinhole photographs in a pretty interesting way -- rather than using photo-sensitive paper or film inside a separate camera, he creates the camera using photo paper itself. The resulting photograph is exposed onto the inside of the photo-sensitive camera (which he calls the "PaperCam"), and creates a pretty surreal look when opened up and developed.

Michael Zhang

Sharan Cardboard Pinhole Camera Kits

Sharan pinhole cameras are Japanese-made cardboard camera kits that you buy and build yourself. All the parts are pre-cut, and can be assembled using tape in about 1 to 2 hours with the help of step-by-step instructions. The STD35 is a standard 35mm pinhole camera, while the Wide-35 allows you to take panoramic photos.

Michael Zhang

Automated Pinhole Camera Built with Lego Mindstorms

Pinhole cameras are usually very low-tech and dumbed-down in their operation, but how would one go about making it fancier like a digital camera? Basil Shikin decided to build his own custom pinhole camera using Lego Mindstorms, adding all sorts of awesome features to an ordinarily simple kind of camera. Features include automatic shutter speed calculation using a sensor, automatic film rewind, and the tracking of how much film remains.

Harry Lim
Subjectiv Lens

Lo-Fi Photography with a 4-in-1 Lens

 

If you're a fan of lo-fi images produced by plastic or pinhole camera, you don't have to carry around multiple cameras or lenses. The "Subjectiv" lens give you four shooting modes in one lens and is compatible with Nikon and Canon.

Michael Zhang

Turn Your Halloween Pumpkin into a Pinhole Camera

Claire O'Neill and Mito Habe-Evans over at NPR's The Picture Show blog have just posted a fun experimental project you can try out this halloween: making a pinhole camera out of a pumpkin. What you'll need is a pumpkin, aluminum foil, a knife, tape, photo paper, dark spray paint, and access to a dark room. Along with the disturbing skull camera we shared earlier today, this would be a fun way to capture photos of trick-or-treaters this halloween.

Michael Zhang

Third Eye: A Human Skull Pinhole Camera

There probably isn't a more suitable camera for halloween picture taking than "Third Eye", a macabre pinhole camera created with a 150-year-old human skull by Wayne Martin Belger. Light enters the camera through the "third eye" on the forehead, exposing the film that's placed in the middle of the skull.

Michael Zhang

Wide Angle Pinhole Cap for Micro Four Thirds Bodies

The Pinwide is a new pinhole cap by Wanderlust Cameras that takes advantage of the mirrorless nature of Micro Four Thirds cameras by recessing the cap into the body of the camera, achieving a wide field of view and strong natural vignetting. The "lens" is the equivalent of a 22mm on a 35mm camera, and boasts a perfectly round pinhole "made with the same precision etching technology used to manufacture semicoductors" to ensure sharpness.

Michael Zhang

Turn Your Panasonic Micro Four Thirds Camera into a Digital Holga

If you have a Panasonic Micro Four Thirds camera and a love for retro photos, the Skink Pinhole Pancake Pro Kit can instantly turn your camera into a digital Holga pinhole camera. It's a modular system that provides three kinds of "holes":

Depending on the desired effect, you can use your camera as a pinhole-, zone plate- or zones sieve camera. To a high degree the installed aperture determines how your vision is creatively interpreted in rendering an image. The traditional pinhole creates relatively sharp images with exposure times ranging from one second to several minutes. With a zone plate or zone sieve however, photos can be taken without a tripod, if the lighting conditions permit higher speeds.