So I was interested in pinhole cameras and diy cameras for quite some time and when I saw Joe Van Cleave’s video about Nick Dvoracek designed and handmade cardboard camera with hilarious name Evil Cube I thought to myself “this might be it”.
You know, I thought I will eventually make some type of camera from plywood and I even bought myself some of that, but camera made from packaging cardboard that mostly gets thrown away and most people considers it literally trash gives the project another level of enjoyment for me. And it’s easier. So easy anyone can do it. Plus, how much better things can get than make diy pinhole camera from cardboard box of whiskey or even Chanel 5!
So decision was made to make some 35mm pinhole. 35mm because I can bulk load it and experiment and learn the ropes as they say. Nick has that covered in form of the Populist camera.
I highly recommend to check out Nick’s templates that includes 35mm pinhole camera and also multiple medium format cameras that you can make. The idea is that one can print the template, glue it onto the cardboard a assemble it. If you used to make glued paper models as kid, similar to one of these, the idea is quite familiar and natural.
So, I got my scissors ready and got started. First minor hiccup for me was I run out of ink in my printer, so I had to copy the templates directly from the pc monitor with pencil and paper.
You know, on his blog Nick specifically warns about to be sure you don’t zoom the pdf with template, otherwise of course dimensions are wrong. I went ahead and did that mistake anyway and copied one of the pieces bigger than it should be. What confused me even more was that it seemed to me the non-fitting piece would fit 120 film perfectly.
In my maker’s excitement I went straight ahead to emailing to Nick if there is possible mistake in the templates that I might found, only to realize my stupid mistake few minutes later. But email was sent, too late. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised by Nick’s friendly response (maybe I should know better and not be surprised…). So in the end my mistake had positive outcome I would say. Was it one of those Happy Accidents? I would say so.
Other than that everything went quite smoothly.
So there you go, my first diy pinhole camera. I’m already sure it won’t be my last (at least I hope). The process of making it was exciting and I really like it!
I already had to fix one issue – paper I chose is not thick enough and lets light inside even though it is painted black inside. To fix this i used 120 film backing paper, which is totally light-tight I would say. I just taped it in inside.
Same thing with the shutter.
One other issue I have is strange pattern appearing on photos.
I’m not sure what causes this, at the time cannot think of nothing else than my pinhole has some issue, so I made another one and gotta test that out.
Update: I really must be dumb as a brick, right? I changed pinhole and no progress – pattern still the same. Then right before sleep it finally came to me – the back of the camera leaks light! I did taped in 120 backing paper to fix thin paper leaks, but only on the camera front. Ah, silly me. I still have to test it, but now I’m pretty sure I got to the bottom of it. Well, I sure will be a little bit smarter when I’ll be making a Mark II.
For now I’ll leave you with a few sample images from some testing and gonna be writing about this more later.
