Homemade Matchbox Pinhole Camera

Alan of alspix has come up with a nice a easy solution for creating a pinhole camera from a simple matchbox. here is how he describes it (check out alspix blog for the most updated instructions):

My first couple of 35mm pinhole cameras attempted to be panoramic, wide angle jobbies but this time I thought it would be nice to get back to the classic square format.

Here’s my latest contraption which uses 35mm film to provide square images of 24 x 24mm. Using this size means that you can get up to 50 exposures on a standard roll of 36 exposure film. Now that’s what I call economy!

The image edges suffer from distortion that gives a “Diana” quality to the pictures. In fact, the images look very “toy camera” like indeed, except that the pinhole allows some really good close ups due to the DOF of the pinhole.

It’s also costs pretty much nothing to build – certainly a lot cheaper than a $100 Diana off ebay!

So far I’ve only run a single roll of colour film through it, which I then developed in B&W chemicals,so the results are a bit odd but they did prove it worked. I’ll be posting additional photos (colour too!) onto my flickr site, check it out .

All you need is a matchbox, an empty roll of 35mm film, some new 35mm film, some black tape and a bit of foil! at the end, this is wht you will get, a small “spy like” pinhole camera.