A $1 Camera That Actually Works!
Sep 16, 2026 · 7:01 AM UTC
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Video made in Riga, Latvia. A place where the first spy camera was invented and built.
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Cost of film is about 15€, and for same price you get funcional digital camera which makes better photos and it is sometimes even integrated with printer. Only point to make such camera is recording and publishing stupid video of it.
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We made pinhole cameras in Grade 9 out of a shoebox
I remember taking a few GREAT photos - like the same quality as a conventional camera
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if I wanted blurry, foggy photos I could just use my iPhone. jk jk Camera Obscura and pinhole cameras are very cool
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Love this build. The optics are amazingly simple: light travels in straight lines, so rays from each point in the scene that squeeze through the tiny hole land on the film and form an inverted image. No glass, no focus ring—just geometry. A properly-sized pinhole gives you essentially infinite depth of field, so something an inch from the tin and something on the horizon get treated the same.
The principle itself is ancient. Mozi described the inverted image around 400 BCE; Aristotle noticed it too. Ibn al-Haytham studied it systematically in the 11th century. Actual photographs through a pinhole show up in writing by the 1850s. So the mint-tin version is a 21st-century container for an idea that’s been around for millennia.
Pinhole photos are a little soft, a little glowing, near and far equally present, often with a timeless or slightly haunted quality. Long exposures turn moving people into ghosts. Imperfections become part of the look. It’s slow, handmade photography at its most direct.
We can take hundreds of photos with our phone. But a handmade pinhole camera is about the simple creativity and the exploration of seeing with almost nothing—just a hole, a dark tin, and time.
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This reminds me of the photographer who did this with his mouth 😀 dpreview.com/articles/170498…
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