A Skull, An Egg And 14 Other Unusual Objects Turned Into Cameras

A Room

Last year, for the 10th anniversary of the September 11th tragedies, we got the chance to talk to Joe McNally about his Faces of Ground Zero project. To get the life-sized portraits, he used the Polaroid camera at Moby C in New York City. It's literally a room and creates Polaroid images as big as nine-feet. It uses a lens taken from a military spy plane to achieve shocking detail when the prints are examined up close. According to Joe, each exposure cost about $300 and the camera is no longer in operation because of a lack of materials. It required three people to operate, two of which had to technically be inside the camera. Truly fascinating. Of course, you can always get a small taste of it by doing the age-old camera obscura trick with your window.{C}A Delivery Truck

A rather shady-looking truck full of toxic chemicals and guys with gas masks sounds like something out of Breaking Bad. But, for Ian Ruhter, the whole thing is a camera. The old delivery truck is used to make large-scale wet-plate photographs of beautiful places. He built it himself by adding a sheet of black out material to the back of the truck with a lens in the center. He then develops the photographs right there on location, mostly out of necessity.

According to Ruhter, each photo costs roughly $500 by the time it gets to finished product. To listen to him talk about his work, though, makes that seem almost reasonable.

A Pumpkin

Believe it or not, the noble pumpkin is actually a relatively common object for hacking into a camera. They're cheap, the flesh is easy to cut into whatever shape you want, and once you scoop out all that goo, there's plenty of room inside for light to move freely from front to back. You can find several tutorials online (one is posted above), and they make for a good starter project because pumpkins are a lot easier to come by than 150-year-old skulls. Plus, because it's a pinhole, you can use a piece of gaffer's tape over a small hole as a shutter and a lens.{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}