wooden monet diy camera

Sooooo, I'm finally doing this. Here is that one camera I made.


Front and back. Simple as that.

But yeah, it's made out of maple. Really simple construction. The shutter is a piece of wood that you can take out to unblock the light, or put it in to block the light. There is also a simple gear thing to make the film only turn one way. It takes 120 film, has a red window for checking the frame. Also it has a screw on front aperture disc thing.

Here is an image of the inside and it in the act of taking a picture.



Yup. That's it. I posted some of the pictures that I took with it a couple posts back. So yeah. Camera.

homemade lens

Ok, as I said, I should have started this a while ago. Now I have to play catch up.

I have always loved the lomography look, odd color casts, vignetting, soft focus, but was never in love with lomography price (a $100 plastic camera? no thank you.) So it occurred to me that I could simply make my own version of these plastic beauties, for little to nothing. After all, they're only good because they use really shitty, poorly manufactured lenses. And poorly manufactured? I think I can handle that. : )

So with absolutely no knowledge of lens design, I set forth to make my own. All I knew is that I wanted to make a detachable lens for my Nikon FA, so somehow I would need to integrate the nikon f mount. And I made one. See, isn't it pretty?

Well, ok, that isn't actually the first. I killed the first to make this one. The first one I used the lens from a magnifying glass; this one the lens is from a little tykes binocular set. Over all, a big improvement. All the lens is really is a single converging (converging focuses light) lens attached to some paper billows, by means of some mat board, hot glued on a nikon body cap with a hole drilled through it. Very simple really, with some really fun results.

I love the sort of in focus, sort of not in focus feeling, and how it suggests form, rater than states it. What I don't love, however, is how telephoto this thing is. It's like 130mm!

So I made another. This time with two lenses. The same lens as the other one, on top of a magnifying glass lens, which reduced the focal distance from 130mm to 70mm. And made it much easier to focus.

I much prefer this one. It is smaller, easier to focus, and much wider. And its just so cute! Just look at it on my camera!

A beauty for sure. Annnnnddddddddd here are some of the results from it.

Oh boy. I think I'm spent for my first blog post.

more to come...