10th anniversary iPhone Box Pinhole Camera

I mean how can you not make a camera out of an iPhone box. It's almost exactly the height of a 120 reel.

My used iPhone 5, which didn't come with a box, turned into an attractive little brick one day this winter, and I'm not sure I can live without Pinhole Assist, so I bought a new iPhone SE.  I suppose the boxes for the 6 and 7 are close to the same width, just a little longer.

There's a rich tradition of making cameras from iPhone boxes. I've seen 6 x 6 cm and 6 x almost 9 cm for 120 and versions for 35mm. I'm pretty sure I saw several simple versions loaded with photo paper using tape for a shutter (which would take about 10 minutes to make) this year reviewing submissions for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

It's a really good box. It's a double layer of pretty high quality card which is reliably opaque. The printed outer layer wraps completely around the box so there are no seams or overlaps. It is still paper but it's pretty durable. I used a damp cloth to clean off excess glue several times, and you can erase pencil marks and fingerprints without damaging the surface. The top fits on the bottom precisely with hardly a gap between the two.

And of course it really looks good.  I couldn't cover up that design. This one has several Sharpie marks in one corner where it looks like somebody got a little too enthusiastic signing a shipping form on a palette full of iPhones, but I thought that gave it a little provenance and patina.

Of course there are things you can't change.  It's 36mm from pinhole to film. Kinda wide but that's actually pretty popular.  (The Zero 2000 is 25mm.) With a 6 cm film width that makes the angle of view 80°.  In order to make it a roll film camera the front of the camera needs to be the bottom, inner part of the box.  I can think of ways around those but Occam's Razor ya' know.

I decided to make it 6 x 6 cm.

The box is about 20mm wider than I need. I put a double layer of black foam core at either end.  The interior structure is made  from flat pieces of black matte board. Vertically, it's just a little longer than the 120 reel, so in the film bays, there's a single layer of matte board at the top.

The winders are my standard 3/8 inch oak dowels with the whittled ends, but they're glued into some cut-off cork stoppers from our local olive oil and balsamic vinegar vendor to give a little more torque when advancing the film and a more finished look.  They're only held in by friction, but I tried to make them pretty tight. My prohibition against violating the design meant I didn't want to use a winder minder, which would require rubber bands. They're actually a little hard to get out.

The bottom of the box is mostly white with a few labels with small printing and bar codes that identify the individual phone with a big white space in the middle.  In order to blend in the front shutter as much as possible, I constructed it out of solid white poster board, which I got at Walgreens of all places.  There is a layer of black poster board in the back of the sliding shutter to make sure it was opaque. It only ended up covering one of the bar codes.  I usually have the shutter pull out of the top -  I think out of some sense of symmetry - but since the top part of the box overlaps the bottom by just a little bit, it got in the way, so the shutter slides out to the side.

I made a .26mm pinhole. Mr. Pinhole says .253 is optimal.  That makes it f138.  Kinda fast, but that's part of why these short pinhole cameras are so popular.

Earlier this year I found a piece of liver of sulfur an art student gave me years ago and seemed to successfully tarnish a pinhole moderately dark with it, so I bought some liver of sulfur paste to try again. I assumed sanding the brass would be sufficient to remove the coatings that are commonly applied to sheet brass so I didn't follow the directions to clean it with ammonia (This is really a smelly process).  In my first experiment with the paste, it seemed to change the shiny brass only slightly -   until I looked at it with the Teslong. Those coatings must be pretty tough, because under the higher resolution, I could now see that right around the pinhole, where it was actually pierced and most aggressively sanded to remove the burr, you could now see it was tarnished nearly all black, which is all you need.  The rest of the brass can be shiny as new, but if the pinhole itself is black, you've gotten all the optical benefit.  Also, I used to be bothered by getting the sanded off material stuck inside the pinhole and it was tricky to get rid of it without enlarging the pinhole accidentally.  I'm not sure if it was the liver of sulfur or running it under hot water for minutes afterward but this one is really clean.

One thing I like about the SE box is that it has an image on the phone that's relatively symmetrical around both a vertical and horizontal axis, so I could make the camera in it's horizontal position without it looking like it's laying on it's side. The only thing that really determines what's upright is where the tripod mount and viewfinders are. Since the format is square, it really wouldn't matter if you made it vertical (which I have done a couple times with Scotch boxes.)

My original intent for the film counter shutter was to cut out the iPhone image, but I was afraid I couldn't cut it out neatly enough.  I just made the shutter from black matte board with a couple of laser printed copies of the image to imitate the original appearance of the box. Again, the image gave me plenty of room with featureless black areas, so I didn't have to match anything too exactly.

I ended up using a square nut for the tripod mount. Since the card stock of the inner box is so thick, I had to inset it into the box or the tripod screw wouldn't reach it. It will be held on pretty firmly by the outside box so I'm not too worried about it falling out.

Again in a bid to be as unobtrusive to the design as possible, I used white beaded pins for the viewfinders.

So what kind of pictures would be appropriate to take with an iPhone box camera?

The iPhone practically invented the selfie. I love how prominent the new scar on my right knee is.

People post a lot of pictures of cats on the internet that are probably done with iPhones.

Meals seem to be another popular subject - brocolli and cheese quiche with watermelon.

I see people using iPhones to capture local sights and attractions such as the statue of Chief Oshkosh in Menomonie Park.  I love it that he's looking out over Lake Winnebago facing away from the city.

I wonder how close I can get with this thing - it's a little tricky with this wide angle.

One night I had a fit of insomnia and you're not supposed to read on your iPhone if you ever expect to get back to sleep, so I read a book about the Photo-Secession.

Our first iPhone was a 3GS in 2009.  About that time a home decorating store in Oshkosh gave away these black sheep pillows as some sort of promotion. I decided it would make a good head rest where I sit on the couch.  As we sat down that evening, I asked Sarah what we should name it. She was engrossed by her first transcendent experience with the source of all knowledge in her hand and immediately replied "Steve Jobs."

Sarah's family farm is over the ridge from Ellsworth, the nearest town, and cell reception varies from awful to non existent, but there's this spot under the tree toward the barn where it's a little more reliable.

And I'm sure vegetarian Steve Jobs would approve of a picture of tomatoes and a garlic scape from the farmers market, and home-grown orange cherry tomatoes.

Two orphaned 120 rolls of Portra 160.

I've just finished two rolls that started one way last year and then kind of got forgotten.

When I finished the roll which I took to the Paine Art Center in the Evil Cube, I thought I had left the camera sitting empty on display on a tripod in the living room, but when I went to load it for documenting my surgery experience, I pulled the back off, saw that I had reloaded it with Portra 160 and as fast as I could, pushed the back closed again.  Wanted to use the 400 for the medical coverage, so I just rolled the 160 back on the original reel (why you have two winders) and put it in the freezer with a note on it. After I finished the Shut-in challenge with the faster film, I loaded the orphaned 160 back into the Evil Cube.  It was on frame one when I opened the camera, so I thought I would be safe to advance to frame four. Turns out, frame three was probably OK.

This was when the magnolia was still blossoming, and I'm always taken by the pattern of the falling petals around the trunk and the daffodils.

By this time in my recovery, I was cooking a little again, so got seduced by a sunbeam in the south kitchen window. Since I've taken similar shots many times, I hung the cane on the sink to place it in context.

This was a week before WPPD, and I did a more loosely framed version of the same dish of fruit that was tightly cropped on Pinhole Day.  It's actually sitting on cake plate (you can see the shadow of the base), but it looks a little like it's floating in air.

The other orphan roll, was from the other camera I had with me that one gloomy day I shot in the Paine Art Center, the Glenlivet Vertical Populist.

It was very dark except for a few minutes of sunshine that day, and I could only fit one hour and a half exposure in with that camera. This is in the powder room off Mrs. Paine's sitting room. It's behind a velvet rope across the door which is just to the left of the frame, so you never see it face on like this.

When I got home, I put the camera on the shelf in the basement and kind of forgot about until I shot the other orphaned roll.

In order to ride for the first time after surgery, I had to put the summer tires on, which I did on the sunny driveway.

One of the oaks making a calligraphic stroke on the garage.

Gene and Laura came to visit. Here's Gene shortly after they arrived after driving through rain for three hours.

He had calmed down quite a bit the next morning.

Laura in a near real time discussion of a casting announcement for a community theater production.

Don't you just hate having to use up the leftovers after you have guests?

And, in case you were wondering about what happened to that tulip trying to grow up through the rose thorns on Pinhole Day.

The first three with the Evil Cube.  .3mm pinhole 60mm from 6x6cm frame.

The rest with the Glenlivet Vertical Populist. .3mm pinhole 45mm from 6x6 frame.

Studies in black and white.

One result of all this camera making lately is I feel the need to run film through them and actually try to experience what it's like to use them.  This is how I learned about using two layers for the shutter to make it stiffer, and not to trust the template print and card stock to be totally opaque.

But, I've always been the kind of person that can't just fire off a roll of film without wanting to get the best pictures I could, and I'm also a little impatient to see the results, so I find myself in the not unpleasant situation of approaching the task as a student of basic black and white photography again. And I'm not unpleased with the results.

You never know what you're going to find at the farmers market.  I've been finding myself calling to vegetables a lot lately, and it looks like they're responding. Obviously one way to study something is to emulate the classic genres. According to his Daybooks (which come to think of it I emulate a little in this blog), before he took the famous funnel photograph, Weston held on to that pepper and kept photographing it for a week until it almost withered. I still haven't had the nerve to cook these two entwined carrots, but the other two have already been in the other kind of soup.  

Here are the cameras I've been talking about. Obviously the camera that took this picture is not in the image. It's a little different and there will be another post about that camera eventually

The one on the left is The 10-year-old Populist.

The 60mm black one on the bottom right is what I used to take the snowy day pictures and the test with 6 different pinholes - note how the black top layer of the paper on the front has torn away by taping all those pinholes to it.  It's also got the single-thickness middle layer shutter which is too easily bendable. The one on the left on the bottom is a 45mm which I discovered needed more light-proofing when I tested it with a strip of paper.  The 60mm one on the top, made out of the same Cheerios box card stock, I just finished a roll in, and the three coats of paint seem sufficiently opaque, but I haven't scanned the negatives yet. 

One thing interesting about photography mentioned by Henry Talbot in The Pencil of Nature is how the same Bust of Patroclus can look different when illuminated with different angles and qualities of light.  Here's the corner of the sun room in the afternoon.

And just after dawn in the morning.

Looking for a new angle is sometimes all you need. I've done a million pictures of the dining room from the kitchen door and from the living room, but I don't think I've ever put the camera on top the piano.  This was just before sunset.

Taking advantage of the weather is a strategy. We had one extremely foggy day, but it was also misting pretty heavily.  Not the weather you want to expose a paper camera to but there are ways around that.  Our magnolia after it was ratted on by a neighbor for blocking their view from backing out the driveway (funny it never blocked my view) and was forcibly pruned by the city.

A classic genre for me is the sun coming in the south kitchen window.

The 7th hole on the yellow disk golf course at the Winnebago County Park. The sun is only maybe 15 degrees above the top and shining straight onto the camera with no flare. This is the first pinhole I've ever tarnished with Liver of Sulfur. I only had a little lump, but I've bought more and look forward to experimenting with it.

All with Arista.edu 100 developed in Caffenol with a .28mm pinhole 45mm from a 6x6cm frame.

Left alone with fruit and vegetables.

I recently burned the onions when I wasn't paying attention a couple times, so I've been making sure I stayed in the kitchen and watched them while they cook.  There's also been a lot of produce around, this is right next to the west window of the kitchen and lately this happens just before sunset when the sun is streaming in, and of course, there's usually a pinhole camera sitting on the kitchen table.

It all started with this odd arrangement on an ear of corn.

Of course a lot of this produce is getting chopped up with some extra left over.

They come in all sizes and colors

You can photograph them from either side.

They often sit in this bowl for a while.

In various combinations.

And some you have to handle very carefully.

All with the Populist. .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.