Pinhole Camera!

I'm sooo excited! Thanks to my current unemployed status, I get to spend my days doing exactly what I want to do. (Provided, of course, that what I want to do involves essentially no money cuz unemployed = poor.) So today, after sleeping in until 9 and going for a 7 mile run in Florida Canyon, I spent the better part of my day making a pinhole camera from a oatmeal container, and a aluminum can (Steel Reserve, 8.1 % alcohol...rocking it ghetto style!) Then I went to the neighborhood camera shop and put together the neccessities for a low budget, in-bathroom darkroom.

The pinhole camera took about three hours to put together. The inside and lid needed to be spray painted black to minimize reflections inside the "camera". (Thanks to Jerry for eating oatmeal and having black spray paint in the closet.) The pinhole was made with a safety pin in a piece of aluminum from a beer can Ryan left on the counter a few days ago. (Thanks to Ryan for drinking Steel Reserve.) I made a makeshift shudder from cardboard and junk mail, then presto, a pinhole camera! Check it out!

In the makeshift bathroom darkroom I have a "safe light" which provides a small amount of reddish light but won't expose the photographic paper. I also have chemical developer, stopper, and fixer. Here's what the "dark room" looks like.

You load the "camera" with a 5X7 sheet of photographic paper. The image is directly exposed onto the paper without the use of a negative. Of course it's inverted colorwise, and orientation-wise, but after developing it, it can be scanned and the colors flipped using a computer image software like Adobe.

So here it is, the first ever image captured with the oatmeat canister pinhole camera. I made the camera and ryan helped with the shudder operation and the development of this one.

It's a picture form the balcony looking into the back alley. It's a bit overexposed, but not too bad for a first attempt. More to come soon I'm sure!