612 Juice Box Camera

This camera was one of those "spur of the moment" cams - and one I decided I would make from only what I had in the kitchen/recycle bin at the time.



The camera is made from three 1 liter juice boxes of the TetraPak variety. The winding mechanism is based on a pencil stub with a empty, flattened eraser holder. The winder is held in place with bread bag clips, and there are washers of TetraPak material on both sides of the box to make it light-tight. The spools ride on decapitated push pins pressed into 2L pop bottle caps - (full height on the one side, trimmed flat on the other) giving a perfect size for the native box dimensions.

The finished camera is held together with elastic bands, plus a swath of hockey tape around the whole seam for light proofing. Don't expect a tight wrap on the film - you'll need to unload in the dark or in a changing bag. The flexibility of the box material also can be a pain when trying to hold the camera still - I eventually made a wooden base plate with a tripod mount in it to overcome this design limitation. The plate is just banded on with the elastics.

If you want try making one of these feel free to ask for more details with a comment.



The camera owes a nod to Nick Dvoracek's Populist Camera. I recommend Nick's site - it has some good articles he's written on pinhole photography. You can often find Nick hanging around at f295 as well.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding: here's a test shot from the Trinity Western Campus (down at "Trinity Lake"). I've cropped the ragged edges and added a frame in Adobe CS2.