Photographer Joel Pirela set out to build a “real” lomographic camera that will beat the looks of any iPhone lomographic application. I mean, slapping a sticker on your iPhone and using instagram can never compare to the feeling that you get from pressing a real shutter on a real camera.
But gutting a vivicam and placing it into a dark walnut and aluminum body will get you a pretty decent antique look and feel. The lens used is an Olympus OM series interchangeable lenses, a lens similar to compact digital cameras.
“We started out with the idea craftsmanship of design would lead with functionality figured out afterward…kind of like a working concept. Starting out with a semi-working model was a totally different approach to design than we were used to doing and you can figure a lot of stuff out as you go along.
As a donor, we used a Vivitar Vivicam 5025 camera; it needed to be gutted in order to being able to fit all the internals inside the tiny 0.75″ frame. A new battery pack had to be ordered instead of using the standard AAA batteries, so we could make more room inside the casing.
The camera still needs some effort to charge batteries and unload the SD card. They are both behind screws, but future enhancements like using a mini USB for charging the batteries and using an Eye-Fi card to unload pictures will make this the prefect digital camera for lomographics. Here are some sample pictures.
DigiLomo Camera: The Homemade Lomography Camera via make, crave
