The truck is not alone. Not by a long shot.

December 27, 2018 8:43 AM

Heather Oelklaus keeps a yellow box truck parked outside her Colorado Springs home, a “big, yellow monstrosity” she calls “Little Miss Sunshine.” It also happens to be a pinhole camera. (What is pinhole photography?)
posted by asperity (11 comments total)

When I think of trucks and pinhole cameras, I think of the episode of Bloodhound Gang on 321 Contact where they used a hole to see what was going on outside, pinhole camera style.
posted by symbioid at 10:13 AM on December 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

I also love that she's turned so many seemingly random objects into pinhole cameras (as noted in the post title, I see).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:28 AM on December 27, 2018

I was a little confused that the article didn't include any of the photographs from these pinhole cameras.
posted by alex_skazat at 10:51 AM on December 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Here's one using the teapot, and it's really fucking cool:

http://www.camerakarma.com/#!/3/featured/Cameras_with_the_images_they_produce/188

I'd hope she can share others.

OK, here's more:

http://www.camerakarma.com/#!/3/featured/Cameras_with_the_images_they_produce/188

Perhaps it's a weirdly design website that's making it hard to view her work. The box truck seems to function more as a darkroom, tho.
posted by alex_skazat at 10:57 AM on December 27, 2018

The photos from each camera are hidden in the article; you drag a little slider to reveal them. It is a terrible UI choice.
posted by migurski at 11:09 AM on December 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

Ah, I should've noted that about the link. Uncharacteristically visual content from my local radio station, so it's not the kind of choice they have to make very often!
posted by asperity at 11:51 AM on December 27, 2018

Pinhole photography is a medium uniquely suited to this sort of improvisation. When I managed my college darkroom and had access to weird film and processing chemicals I went through a period making just about anything into cameras. A professor turned me on to Steven Pippin who does similar work. My largest camera (which actually used a zone plate) was built into a closet with a window and projected an image circle a good one and a half meters in diameter. I couldn't afford filling it with paper though, so only have small 35mm negs of the image from the inside kicking around somewhere.
Fast forward to this very week and my Christmas present to myself was a full frame digital camera that suddenly inspires me to dig out the lens-less photography gear mounted in Nikon body caps I made in college.
posted by St. Oops at 12:39 PM on December 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

My first thought on seeing that was the camera obscura at Garden of the Gods (F), which coincidentally was near Colorado Springs.
Sadly, it's no longer there, but it kind of had the same feel, despite being a different technology.
posted by MtDewd at 3:18 PM on December 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

• More about Pinhole Photography and the Camera Obscura.

• The Great Picture was taken by converting an abandoned aircraft hangar into the world’s largest pinhole camera.

• 7 Cameras Obscura you can visit in England, Scotland, Spain, and the USA.

• The Hockney–Falco Thesis (great artists cheated a little).
posted by cenoxo at 10:18 PM on December 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

One of the bright spots of unloading trailers at the toysaurus in the 90s came when I realized that a hole in the side of the trailer we were unloading functioned like this, projecting an upside-down version of our parking lot on the opposite wall.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 11:44 AM on December 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Remember kids, never look directly at the Sun. Always Make a Box Pinhole Projector to Safely Watch a Solar Eclipse, and if you don’t have a box, use the nearest tree instead.
posted by cenoxo at 11:26 PM on December 28, 2018