There is something magical about taking REAL photographs. . . the process of seeing, capturing light, then transferring it to paper is almost a mystical process. Nowadays, high-tech digital cameras allow this process to happen without effort, but what if you could achieve the magic of photography from a cardboard box that you make yourself?
And no, that’s not a hypothetical question!
London based designer and owner of The Pop-Up Pinhole Co. Kelly Angood has made this a reality through her latest Kickstarter campaign, VIDDY: The 30 Minute DIY Pinhole Camera Kit.
If you’re not familiar with them, pinhole cameras use “a single small aperture—a pinhole—instead of a lens. As light passes through this hole, an image is exposed onto the film loaded inside the camera.”
The VIDDY in particular is a screen-printed, do-it-yourself pinhole camera kit made from durable recycled cardboard that can be constructed in about 30 minutes. It uses both medium format and 35mm film, and exposure can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours.
As Angood states, “It strips complex photographic concepts down to their basic foundation: light. How much to let in, and for how long.”
The VIDDY pinhole camera is the result of years of experimentation and community feedback. Angood designed her first pinhole camera while in college, but it wasn’t easy to reproduce on a large scale, so she developed a downloadable pattern that could be made with common household items. The result was over 60,000 downloads, thousands of shared pinhole images and the birth of a special community.
This community helped kickstart Angood’s first do-it-yourself pinhole camera kit, the VIDERE, brought to life in an earlier 2013 Kickstarter campaign. It became the focus of many creative projects, plus a lot of valuable feedback. From this, the current VIDDY was born.
The VIDDY project has a monetary goal of £18,000 that has already been successfully funded, but it will stay open until September 7, 2014 for anyone else who wants to join. To take a peek at this amazing project, or grab a VIDDY for yourself, make sure to visit their Kickstarter site before then!
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