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.

Forget gingerbread houses, this is a fully-functional if low-fidelity gingerbread camera. (📹: Dmitri Tcherbadji)

"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.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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