Saw my first cameras-turned-into-lamps today..

jay moussy

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Cannot be unseen!
Lamps, $600 each!:
A nice looking early Land camera (portal-shaped lens board type)
A stack of three baby Brownies or such

Both looked very awkward to me. Mildly repulsive is more like it.
No attempt was made to do anything other that stab the bodies with a piece of tubing.
Whatever.
 

jim10219

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Awe! I made one myself a year ago. I thought it looked quite nice.

And, to be fair, I made mine out of a broken camera body (who the previous owner JB Welded shut because he stripped out a screw) and a large zoom lens that I tried for months to sell, but no one though it was even worth $10 (which is probably wasn't). The only thing desirable from it was the Tiltall tripod that was pretty worn out. And I have a ton of other tripods already. That one was neither light weight, nor particularly robust in comparison to my others.

It's the kind of thing I thought about making more of and selling, but decided it would be too expensive to find the parts for to do another one. So it's just a one off. $600 does seem a bit high, but you might be spending $200 on parts (camera, lens, tripod, light socket, switch, power cable, lamp shade), plus labor. You could use cheaper parts, but then the lamp would look cheaper. So it would be hard to make it profitable without making it ridiculously priced.

Anyway, here's what I did:
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/camera-lamp.158370/
 

Rick A

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Yep, seen more than I care to see, repulsive is a good term.
 
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jay moussy

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But @jim10219 's work (linked), there is continuity, balance, artistry.
It is not just sticking something through a camera body, like I saw, as if it was a pineapple carving or such.
 

Kino

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One can make a lamp with a camera at its base without drilling a hole in the camera using a bent figurine rod!
 

Ariston

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There are a lot of cameras for which film can no longer be gotten and never will be available again. I don’t mind if their aesthetic is at least preserved through repurposing. The much more common practice is to throw them in the trash. I think they look much better as a lamp than they do in a landfill.

A lucky few people have the skill to modify them for use with a modern film type.
 
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jay moussy

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@Ariston is right they can be repurposed, but unlike what I saw, the Brownies could have been neatly featured, rather than used as a tasteless shape prop. Trust me, it looked dumb.
 
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