Film cameras can be handmade with a piece of light-sensitive paper, a small hole, and a light-tight container – but could a digital camera be built from everyday objects lying around the house? An architecture student and viral creator answered that question when he built an oversized digital instant camera using cardboard, a magnifying glass, a mirror, and a flatbed scanner.
Architecture student Nikita Merkushin (@noizebro) recently shared a viral video showing how he built a camera from a scanner-printer combo – and the video is a refreshing reminder of the basics of how a camera works.
Merkushin used a magnifying glass as the lens of the camera, demonstrating the concept by using the magnifying glass to project an image on a piece of paper.
Next, he built a cardboard house over the top of a printer-scanner combo, with the magnifying glass at the front. Importantly, the back of the cardboard is angled, and inside this angled piece is a mirror. That allows the image from the magnifying glass to hit the scanner bed, despite the lens being positioned perpendicular to the scanner.
Once assembled, Merkushin took the oversized, handmade camera out for a test run, scanning images to his phone. But since he used a scanner with a built-in printer, he was also able to print out instant images on site.
The result is an oversized, very impractical camera, yes – but the experiment also demonstrates the basics of how a camera works – using a lens to project light onto a sensor.
The scanner doesn’t scan the entire image at once, but slowly moves down the image. That means movement becomes distorted. But like the camera itself, this is the perfect example of a common camera design: a rolling shutter.
A camera’s rolling shutter, while much faster than a scanner, scans one line of pixels at a time. The rolling shutter works fast enough that most subjects don’t turn out distorted like the scanner, but the fastest subjects get a jello effect. Global shutters expose the entire sensor at once and don’t get that jello distortion.
Merkushin is no stranger to viral videos. He previously built a film camera on top of a bike helmet that used a pull string to take a photo every time his jaw dropped (literally!). The architecture student also experiments with projections, including a viral video of a projected horse running down the streets, thanks to a bike-mounted projector system.
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