Introducing the Dragon Box

For kicks, I took an old card box I was going to throw out and made it into a pinhole camera. Instead of putting one hole in the middle or the end and calling it a day, I put two holes in and decided to try making a stereoscopic camera. 

Here was my test image, a stereoscopic negative of a building under construction.


And the positive inversion. I printed this as a positive, but made this inversion in Photoshop.


This was the first image that got the camera noticed. I took this onto Zone VI fiber-based paper, so I had to press it after development and drying. I had it pressing under glass and noticed a few people looking at it and commenting on it. It definitely hints at what the Dragon Box (the camera's name) can do.


A Photoshop inversion to show the image's positive.


This negative really did not appear to turn out well at all, so I let it sit without much attention. When I digitized it, though, I decided to invert it. That inversion convinced me that this, the second image I took with the Dragon Box is the first solid sign of what this camera can do.




A double-exposure of a high-tension tower. I exposed the shot and then turned the camera around 180 degrees, capturing the same shot in reverse. Yes, this camera has potential. I'm glad I didn't thrown the box away.


And here's the Dragon Box and an explanation of how to make it.

Film Can Pinhole

For this pinhole camera, I used a 250-foot spool can from some Kodak Vision 3 5217 that I had recently emptied. I painted the inside black and put a laser-drilled 0.1mm pinhole on the front. In positive, it's quite good. In negative, though, it looks soft. But here are a few results from it so far.


Looking out a rabbit hole (not really, it just looks that way.)


A scan of the paper negative.


Sunset. I keep a few magnets on this can because it's magnetic. It's round, so they work well as chocks. For this, I magneted it to a sign to get some extra height. Once the sign stopped moving around, I took the shutter off and exposed the sunset. The clouds turned out pretty well.

Pinhole Camera -- Brisk Iced Tea Can

For fun and a class assignment, I made a pinhole camera from a Brisk Iced Tea can. The can holds up to 5X7 film nicely (it's almost a liter in volume) and so I've tested it with 5X7 and 4X5. The 5X7 film needs holes punched in it.

This was specifically designed to be a trick camera. I punched two pinholes directly into the camera at approximately a 60-degree angle from the image center. This causes overlapping image circles. The pinhole shutters operate independently, though, so I can take the images of opposing directions, the same thing from different angles (as below) or two completely different subjects.

For this shot, I took a picture of a hill, turned the camera so the other pinhole pointed at it, and took the shot again.



This negative image (on photo paper) resulted from a long shot of ducks and a fountain on a pond on top of a more abstract image of moving water.


This is the positive print.


One of my first shots, the hole on the left wasn't in the right place and light couldn't get to the image.