How To Build Yourself a Pinhole Camera Out of a Matchbox

There are lots of film cameras you can try, but if you're feeling adventurous, why not make your own pinhole camera? It's not as hard as you may think, and you may have what you need lying around.

The idea of building your own camera is attractive to me, just because of my obsession with cameras. It's not really about the results that you can create with said camera, but rather that you can create any results at all. I have looked at numerous kits for building film cameras, and I will no doubt buy one or two sooner or later to see what they're like, but what I hadn't seen before is something quite as DIY as this video.

I wouldn't have thought I'd have all or almost all of what is necessary to build my own camera just lying around my house, but perhaps I do. In this video, the base of the camera is simply a matchbox, with a manual shutter out of some card, and even a film winder and counter. The big enemy of this sort of build is light leaks, so if you do try it, make sure that you use a thick black tape to cover every joint and possible entry point.

The resulting images aren't great, as you might expect, but that's hardly the point! With a handful of very basic components, you could make your own, functioning film camera. If you do, please share your results in the comments!

Robert K Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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1 Comment

Someone forgot to calculate the distance between the hole and the film. Then everything is fuzzy. Making a pinhole camera giving good results isn't that easy. Don't follow that tutorial if you don't want to waste film. If you don't care having crappy photos then go on. Good tutorial for what not to do.