DIY, Cameras edition
April 22, 2021 5:28 AM   Subscribe

“The history of photography is based on the experiments of amateurs,” Samuel Trachsel, photographer. The wheel has never been reinvented because the design is simple enough to preclude it. Not so the camera. Here are 15 photographers/tinkerers who do just that.
posted by From Bklyn (9 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was a fun read; thanks for the post.
posted by dhruva at 6:14 AM on April 22, 2021


These are beautiful! I was hoping they'd also include some of the inventiveness that's arisen over the years in the world of digital photography, especially in the early days, when CCDs were prohibitively expensive for amateurs and the wheel really was being reinvented. One of my favorites is the MicronEye from the early 80's. The sensor (the IS32) is literally just an existing 64K DRAM chip that they popped the top off of. That's it! It's even got a broad missing stripe of pixels right down the middle of the image, because that's where the drive electronics were.

IIRC there were also a lot of hobbyists building cameras by taking apart scanners and modifying them to rotate the line scanning element instead of translating it. That, plus a lens, got you a 360° panoramic camera with very high resolution for the time.
posted by phooky at 7:12 AM on April 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


This makes me wish I had mechanical skills.
posted by tommasz at 8:06 AM on April 22, 2021


These are beautiful. In a similar vein, Wayne Martin Belger has done some amazing things.
posted by newmoistness at 8:18 AM on April 22, 2021


Ralph Howell did a lot with pinhole photography from unusual objects. He did a series of photos where the picture was a selfie of the camera. Here's an example of a camera made from a gas mask. I originally saw it in an episode of "Egg the Arts Show" (Best of EGG: Love, Fear, Hope, and Dreams), but I was unable to find a video for it.
posted by plinth at 8:50 AM on April 22, 2021


These are fun, but aren't fundamentally different from the cameras we've had for 100 years. Phooky is right that digital photography has unlocked some really different kinds of cameras. The one that comes to mind for me is the Lytro—I still don't quite understand how it worked.
posted by adamrice at 9:37 AM on April 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


I just discovered single-pixel cameras over the weekend, and I half expected to see one in this list. Absolutely fascinating idea. You only have a single sensor, but you vary the light hitting it over multiple measurements ("exposures" seems like it's overstating things) using some sort of mask in front and build up a model of whatever you're trying to image based on how the measurements change as you modify the mask.

The state of the art for the masks seems to be LCD or micromirror arrays, which might be a bit out of the range of a DIY tinkerer, but here's somebody who built one using a robot arm they could waggle in front of the sensor.
posted by figurant at 9:41 AM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Pinhole camera day is coming up this Sunday! I introduced my daughter to the concept last year with an aluminum baking pan, sewing needle, rubber band and some random lens adapter for my mirrorless camera.

These are some cool and inspiring projects. I've built a few weird cameras in my day, maybe it's time again...
posted by St. Oops at 2:09 PM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Alireza Rostami's magic bokeh images are amazing.
posted by Mitheral at 2:57 AM on April 23, 2021


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