In a fit of sudden inspiration this afternoon, I put together within about a half hour, probably my coolest, cutest, most efficiently-designed pinhole camera yet:
It’s called the Moo Cam because it’s fashioned from a business card box that I got in an order from moo.com, a fabulous service that turns your uploaded photos into cards of various types. The box that mine came in, as you can see, is black and thick enough to be light tight. It has two inter-fitting halves, so immediately my idea was to have one half of the body to double as the shutter as well. All I had to do was to cut a hole, tape in a thin metal sheet with a pinhole (.22mm) behind the hole, add a little electrical tape along the inner lip of the “shutter” half to provide just enough friction to keep the shutter open, put a strip of craft foam on the bottom for a little grip, and then finally insert two thin strips a black craft foam to the inner sides about 1mm from the back to serve as film rail guides and to keep the film flat against the back wall when loaded. The only unfortunate thing is that the width of the box is about 8mm too narrow to accept 9×6.5cm cut film as-is. So, I have to shave off about 8mm along the edge of a sheet in order to use cut film. Of course, I can also use photo paper, which is why I used foam for the guide rails — the foam has just enough flexibility to it so that the slightly thicker paper fits perfectly — both cut film and paper can be used and will stay flat without any adjustment. I just love the idea of camera-body-as-shutter. Here it is with the cut film loaded:
And with the shutter open:
And closed:
And it can be used in landscape mode as well:
Now if we only had some sun today I would try it out. I actually have no idea how it will perform because I wasn’t paying too much attention to optimal hole size versus focal length and coverage of 9×5.5cm film at a relatively short focal length. Something will appear, no doubt. Stay tuned for results, hopefully tomorrow, weather willing….
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