The weirdest camera concoction?!

[Marco B]

Hi all,

I thought it might be fun to make a thread showing weird camera concoctions, after reading an article in a Dutch magazine showing work by a fellow called Fotoopa ("Photo-granddad").

*** If you have a contribution, post a picture or link to it in this thread! Please only links to bizar, fun or ingenious camera concoctions please! ***

So, what did I find:

Ok, we've all seen remotely triggered camera setups from the African wilderness, so nothing new on the horizon you would think, but what about this :

http://www.pbase.com/fotoopa/image/95885886

And "Fotoopa" in action

http://www.pbase.com/fotoopa/image/96689951


It's an automatically triggered macro-setup for photographing insects in flight!

For more details and photo-examples, see here:

http://www.pbase.com/fotoopa/equipment

Marco

 

[Marco B]

Ok, another contribution by myself, based on an article in the Dutch Camera Magazine:

Sorry for the appalling image quality, it is a scan of a very bad photocopy. Apparently, this was a Nikon made 5m(!) focal length 4x5" LF camera mounted on a truck used to photograph a grenade hitting it's target... Talking about "shooting a picture"

The camera used an F5 500cm lens... at least according to the article, but would that even be possible :confused:

 

[ic-racer]

Here is the other extreme: A flying insect robot with a camera in its nose.

 

[SuzanneR]

Never let be said you can't get by with the most basic of materials.

http://www.foto8.com/home/content/view/658/190/

 

[Marco B]

Nice ones, Suzanne and IC-racer!

 

[bhorn]

Leave it to the pinhole crowd to make some wild cameras: http://photondetector.com/blog/2006/06/20/weird-pinhole-roundup/

 

[aparat]

This is camera and lighting from Joe McNally's photo shoot with New York firefighters. It is mostly wireless strobes, so I am not sure if it qualifies as "weird" but it certainly is impressive.

Link to the story:
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2008/07/02/rollin-with-the-pride-of-midtown/

 

[vdonovan]

Spam Cam! I love it!

Leave it to the pinhole crowd to make some wild cameras: http://photondetector.com/blog/2006/06/20/weird-pinhole-roundup/

 

[JBrunner]

http://io9.com/377596/a-camera-made-of-blood-and-copper

Make sure you scroll down to the others.....

 

[bnstein]

I think Jason takes the cake, but this is also worth a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ta32g9M6c

 

[Alexander Ghaffari]

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by KQED"

Aww...bnstein, your video is gone.

JBrunner, interesting cameras.

 

[Marco B]

I think Jason takes the cake, but this is also worth a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ta32g9M6c

The YouTube link to John Chiara's UUUUULF camera is dead, but this one on the KQED site works, and yes, although this is in a sense a more "ordinary" camera, it's sheer size and usage to me puts it in the "Weirdest concoctions" list too...:

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=6820

Thanks all for the great contributions so far!

 

[Joe VanCleave]

Pin-Speck Camera

Okay, here's a rather unusual camera. I built this several years ago. It's a "pin-speck" camera. Instead of a pinhole, it uses a front surface mirror about the same size as a pinhole.

I started with a front-surfaced mirror, from which I cut a small piece off with a glass cutter. Then I coated the mirror with black India ink, leaving a pinhole-sized spot in the middle.

The mirror is located at the apex of both pyramid-shaped enclosures, the smaller pyramid being the shutter, and the larger being the camera chamber proper, with film located at the wide base.

The attached image is from a paper negative.

~Joe

 

[Joe VanCleave]

Fuji TV Lens Cardboard Camera

Here's a camera fashioned from cardboard, using a Fujinon TV lens. I expose paper negatives in the box. F-stop is adjustable; I used a lens cap as the shutter.

~Joe

 

[Joe VanCleave]

5" x 7" Box Camera

This foamcore box camera used an objective lens from a 7x50 binocular. Since these pictures have been taken, I've converted this camera to use a plastic fresnel lens magnifier as a lens.

Four images of the camera, including the foamcore film holder with darkslide pulled out, and a digicam shot of the viewscreen. The screen is made from drafting vellum paper.

The B/W images taken with the camera are on paper negatives. The first image is with the binocular lens; the second is with the fresnel lens.

~Joe

 

[Joe VanCleave]

Pixellator Pinhole Camera

This one is weird, even by my standards.

I wanted an analog pinhole camera that would generate in-camera images that appear to be pixellated, to simulate the appearance of a low-res digital camera.

The principle of the camera is that the lens (either pinhole or refractive) projects an image upon a translucent screen (this camera uses drafting vellum). Behind this screen is a pixellator grid, behind which the paper or film negative is placed. Each cell of the grid takes the portion of the image in front of it and averages its intensity into a square pixel of light.

Cardboard camera (basic pinhole camera building method, no magic here) with the pixellator grid at the rear. The attached image is a self-portrait onto a paper negative.

I've also included two sketches which help to illustrate the operating principle of the pixellator grid.

~Joe

 

[Marco B]

Thanks Joe, great contributions, I especially like the crazy pyramidal look of your pin-speck camera!

 

[Joe VanCleave]

Thanks, Marco. The fuzzy/ vignetted image from the Pin Speck Cam is caused by the entrance cone being covered in black adhesive craft felt, in an effort to minimize forward-scattered stray light; I need to fix that problem by removing the felt that's real close to the mirror box at the apex and just rely on flat black paint; and perhaps later build a better working version into a cubically enclosed box with a diagonal interior bulkhead, rather than pyramid cones.

Due to design limitations these cameras are limited to moderate and longer focal lengths (i.e. wide and super-wide angles of view are not possible without directly fogging the film plane.)

There's also a problem with grazing angles of view causing one side of the image to be softer (and possibly less exposed) than the other side, if the front-surface mirror has issues. You can see why this would be from the illustration I provided: light entering from the upper right grazes the mirror at a flatter angle than light entering from the other side of the cone.

~Joe

 

[Joe VanCleave]

One more unusual camera to share. I took a rather ordinary cardboard pinhole box camera (actually, one of my very first box cameras) and fashioned a kaleidoscope mirror tube to the front of the box, in the hopes of being able to photograph the world as seen through the perspective of a kaleidoscope.

The kaleidoscope tube was from a "do it yourself" kit, and uses a set of metal mirrors inside the tube. This would have worked better if I could have found a higher-quality kaleidoscope that uses a prism instead of the el-cheapo mirrors.

The attached images are again exposed onto paper negatives. I'm pointing the camera at brightly lit daytime scenes, and permitting them to be reflected multiple times through the mirrors of the kaleidoscope tube before exposing the paper.

~Joe

 

[Marco B]

Your camera's are truly amazing and wonderful, love them! Thanks for sharing here, including some of the photographic results.

 

[keithwms]

 

[darinwc]

Weird, the lens in the above photo appears to be faked.. like a lens-shape mask was applied to the print.
Maybe not..

 

[keithwms]

I am just glad I am not the dude with the task of coating plates for that thing!

 

[Marco B]

I have seen an almost similarly sized camera in the Antwerp photo museum in Belgium last year. Quite impressive!

 

[crispinuk]

We've probably all already read about it but for completeness I think the aircraft-hangar-obscura derserves a mention:
http://www.legacyphotoproject.com/
(sorry it's a flashy Flash site)