Combining two of my biggest passions in life — pottery and photography — I have been making ceramic cameras for several years now. These are fully functional cameras that produce black and white prints. Somewhat different from what you'd find at the local camera store, these creations are pinhole cameras.

Pinhole cameras can be made from just about any container, so long as the imaging light reaches the negative only through the small pinhole opening. In my cameras I use black and white photo paper for the negative, and the paper is often fitted into a curved holder to give each camera a unique perspective. In the camera shown at left, the 4 1/4 x 8 inch paper negative arches around the back wall of the camera. The pinhole drilled through the copper sheet metal in front is about 1/100th of an inch in diameter.

This camera is about 16.7 cm tall, and 22 cm wide. It's made of stoneware, reduction fired to cone 10. It has a cobalt blue glaze and decoration. Inside it is glazed matte black. There is no lens, viewfinder nor light meter, and the shutter is strictly manual operation.

The second photo shows a detail of the front of the camera. The small lid acts as a shutter, and it has cork attached to the flange below to hold it snuggly in the camera opening surrounding the pinhole. To take a photograph the camera is loaded with a piece of photo paper in a darkroom, and then taken outside. The shutter is removed and the negative is exposed. The shutter is replaced, and the camera then goes back into the darkroom, the negative is removed from the camera and developed.

The third image is the test image I made with this camera to see if it worked properly. Pinhole cameras typically have very long exposures, and this one was 2 1/2 minutes in full sun. There are some more examples of my ceramic cameras on my Cameras page.