A $1 Camera That Actually Works!

I made a pinhole camera in the third grade. Which was in.... 1983.

That’s awesome! 😄 Some of the coolest science projects never get old!

Video made in Riga, Latvia. A place where the first spy camera was invented and built.

Wow, that’s a cool piece of history! Riga is full of fascinating stories!

Cost of film is about 15€, and for same price you get funcional digital camera which makes better photos and it is sometimes even integrated with printer. Only point to make such camera is recording and publishing stupid video of it.

True, but sometimes the fun is in making it yourself—not just getting the best photo.

Then make it without film, like Leonardo da Vinci did. Today it is more difficult to obtain film and develop it. Not to mention that you have to create another device to project it on paper or digitize it. And all that is quite complicated if you want colour photos.

We made pinhole cameras in Grade 9 out of a shoebox I remember taking a few GREAT photos - like the same quality as a conventional camera

That’s amazing! Shoebox cameras really did make some surprisingly good shots!

Not even my Sony Ericsson was that expensive

and 40 bucks for the print and film per roll

bruh, the film is like $15 for one roll. this is false advertisement

This is cool until they call the bomb squad.

$1? How much did the sharpie, film, and tape cost?

That's more than a dollar with film, the cost of the tin, and the tape. You can buy a disposable for cheaper and the pics are actually pretty good, unlike this disaster.

Love this build. The optics are amazingly simple: light travels in straight lines, so rays from each point in the scene that squeeze through the tiny hole land on the film and form an inverted image. No glass, no focus ring—just geometry. A properly-sized pinhole gives you essentially infinite depth of field, so something an inch from the tin and something on the horizon get treated the same. The principle itself is ancient. Mozi described the inverted image around 400 BCE; Aristotle noticed it too. Ibn al-Haytham studied it systematically in the 11th century. Actual photographs through a pinhole show up in writing by the 1850s. So the mint-tin version is a 21st-century container for an idea that’s been around for millennia. Pinhole photos are a little soft, a little glowing, near and far equally present, often with a timeless or slightly haunted quality. Long exposures turn moving people into ghosts. Imperfections become part of the look. It’s slow, handmade photography at its most direct. We can take hundreds of photos with our phone. But a handmade pinhole camera is about the simple creativity and the exploration of seeing with almost nothing—just a hole, a dark tin, and time.

Get it here 👇

Yeah, because carrying around a big of jaggedass metal and exposed film is a great way to travel.

Where can you 35mm film from

That Kodak film roll cost a dollar?

I have made a few, and yes, they do work.

Invented the Camera Obscura

@tarafaul503

The picture will be much better if the hole is perfectly round. And I'd go for B&W films.

stylé

This is awesome! 🎉

😂😳😳😂

Unbelievable!

How does it work? How do you take a snapshot

Lovely to teach the basics!!

oh so THAT is how an old camera works

Back to basics, back to simplicity. There’s something beautiful about understanding how things work, something we seem to lose a little more of as time goes by.

Камера обскура.

Used the pinhole camera back in high school. Good exercise for understanding light exposure.

How is it taking pictures though? 🤔

pinhole camera, soviet spies used to make these

It can't work without a lens 🤣