Dmitri Tcherbadji's Gingerbread Camera Is a Working Snap-Taking Holiday Snack
Almost entirely edible — except for the film — this gingerbread camera uses a sugar glass lens to take sweet, if soft, pictures.
Photographer, web developer, and maker Dmitri Tcherbadji has built a box camera with a difference: it's almost entirely edible, right down the its sugar glass lens and gingerbread housing — just don't eat the film inside.
"I made something silly in time for the holiday season. It’s a working instant film camera made from gingerbread, icing, and sugar. And the silliest part of it is the sugar lens," Tcherbadji explains in a post on the project, brought to our attention by PetaPixel. "This camera can be used hand-held and indoors — thanks to its large aperture."
The camera body is built from home-made gingerbread parts positioning a sugar glass lens over Fujifilm Instax Square film — focusing enough light onto the film to create recognizable, if admittedly low-fidelity, imagery. "This project took a lot out of me," Tcherbadji told PetaPixels. "Still, I had lots of joyous moments as I discovered solutions for many unexpected issues — from estimating the focal length of the sugar lens to designing the shutter.
"As you may've noticed from the samples," Tcherbadji admits, "sugar is not an easy or ideal material to make a lens from. These pictures are blurrier than a sloppy pinhole! I've learned a lot building this, and I will be learning more as I attempt to expose a few more packs of film before breaking it into pieces later with friends."
Tcherbadji estimates the cost of the project at around $220, the bulk of which was in Instax film for testing and lens calibration — the rest of the camera being mostly low-cost edible parts. The camera's eventual fate should be obvious, of course: it will be eaten, lens and all.
More information is available on Tcherbadji's website, and on PetaPixel.