pinhole

London-based photographer Kelly Angood has had quite a tumultuous year so far in 2013. Last month she announced that she would be turning her popular cardboard medium format camera design into a proper do-it-yourself kit. After launching a Kickstarter campaign to take preorders, she quickly raised over £23,000 (~$34,000) from over 600 supporters.

However, the fact that her camera was based on Hasselblad's famous design turned out to be a dealbreaker. After being informed that she was putting herself at risk of a lawsuit, Angood decided to cancel the project and turn her back on the money. Now, one month later, she's at it again with a different (original) camera design and a new camera kit Kickstarter campaign.

This camera is a poor man's large format camera. It is made with a simple shoebox acting as a dark room.

Remember that beautiful cardboard Hasselblad created by designer Kelly Angood a couple of years ago and released as a PDF template? If you'd like to build your own but don't want to go through the trouble of printing the design onto cardboard and cutting out the pieces, you'll be glad to know that Angood is working on launching a do-it-yourself kit for the camera.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, photographer Michael Falco is shooting a project titled "Civil War 150 Pinhole Project." His goal is to highlight the haunting beauty of civil war battlefields and to chronicle the various battle reenactments that are happening all across the country. To do so, he's using large format pinhole cameras that gives the poetic images an old fashioned look.

When Matthew Allred isn't teaching photography to his students at the University of Utah, he's out creating incredible works of photographic art with the simplest of tools; the pinhole camera.

Allred calls his process 'Heliography', a term first coined by pioneering French photographer Joseph-Niépce in 1822 to describe his photographic invention. Allred's process is not too dissimilar from Niépce in the fact that he constructs his own cameras and even goes as far as formulating his own chemistry for the task.

After taking a pinhole workshop taught by renowned pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell, UK photog Matt Bigwood was inspired to start an interesting pinhole project of his own. Thus was born the six-month long exposure you see above, taken using a pinhole camera made from a beer can, some gaffer tape, and a sheet of 5”x7” black and white photographic paper.

I was standing at the top of the stairs in the Suzzallo Library on the University of Washington campus, looking down at my phone when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I turned to see an older gentleman who gestured towards the hardwood box resting on the handrail of the stairway.

In the Star Wars universe, Lightsabers are hand-built as part of their wielders' training, and each one is as unique as the person who made it. Photographer Matt Abelson seems to have the same idea about cameras: he builds high-quality one-of-a-kind pinhole cameras based on his own designs.

The Hyperscope (shown above) is one of his creations. It's a cylindrical can camera that takes medium-format roll film, and is crafted out of chunks of aluminum.

We've featured large format LEGO cameras before, but what about wide format? Photographer Giacomo Citti created this panoramic LEGO pinhole camera that features a sliding shutter and film winders on the sides.

Potter and pinhole camera enthusiast Steve Irvine created the awesome camera above using fired stoneware, glaze, copper, and found objects. The shape and pressure gauges make it look like an old school diving suit from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Yes, the camera actually works: it uses a 4x5 sheet of photo paper as film.

The Dirkon pinhole 35mm camera is made entirely from paper cut from a template by designers Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolář and Richard Vyškovský. The three published the template in a 1979 issue of Czechoslovakian magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists). While original prints of the magazine are rare, the Dirkon gained cult popularity in Chzechoslovakia.

If you went outdoors to observe the solar eclipse yesterday, you might have noticed that the shadows cast by trees had suddenly become quite strange. The tiny gaps between leaves act as pinhole lenses, projecting crescent shaped images of the eclipsed sun onto the world below.

A group of garbage men in Hamburg have figured out a way to combine their love of photography with their work of hauling trash, turning large dumpsters into giant pinhole cameras to photograph their city. The dumpsters are converted by drilling tiny holes into the fronts and then hanging large sheets of photo paper inside. Although framing a shot with the giant rolling cameras takes only a minute, exposing it can take up to an hour of waiting. They've dubbed the experiment the "Trashcam Project".

German photographer Michael Wesely has spent decades working on techniques for extremely long camera exposures -- usually between two to three years. In the mid-1990s, he began using the technique to document urban development over time, capturing years of building projects in single frames. In 1997, he focused his cameras on the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and in 2001 he began photographing the Museum of Modern Art's ambitious renovation project. He uses filters and extremely small apertures to reduce the amount of light striking the film, creating unique images that capture both space and time.

On January 1st of last year, photographer Michael Chrisman began shooting a solargraph by placing a pinhole …

Here’s a neat idea for photographic experimentation: create a pinhole camera out of photographic paper by folding it into …

Photographer Matthew Nicholson, the guy behind the amazing Lie-ca paper pinhole …

Photographer Chris Keeny came up with a nifty design for a pinhole camera made using an Altoids mint tin. It's pretty fancy too, utilizing a re-loadable film take-up spool that uses a metallic turn key to advance the film.

Mouthpiece is a series of photographs by photographer Justin Quinell in which he documents some of his life's experiences as seen by his mouth. The photographs were captured using a custom pinhole camera created from a 110 film cartridge. It's a unique perspective of the world that we don't often see in photographs.

Nine years ago, during his final year as a fine art photography student in Melbourne, …

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!

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.

Rather than use ordinary film to capture 2D images, photographer ShiKai Tseng shoots …

Skott Chandler's House Watch project consists of photographs taken in private living spaces using a pinhole camera fixed to the ceiling.

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.

Photographer Matthew Nicholson created this paper Leica M3 that's a working pinhole camera. It's loaded with 35mm film, and even the strap is realistic and made with paper!

If you’re planning to try your hand at solargraphy, it might be a …

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.

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.

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".