8×10 camera for $10 in ten minutes

I signed up to teach a photography event to 8-year-olds at a summer activity event. It was scheduled to take place on my college campus in late June, 2025. The ‘class’ was comprised of two 1-hour sessions. My first thought – we could get sheets of blueprint paper and make prints using a crude cardboard box camera with a magnifying glass for a lens. Then we’d process the paper with ammonia fumes in a darkened room. I called around and with a stroke of luck, found an architect’s office with 500 sheets of unused 24×30 inch diazo blueprint paper. I made an 8×10 camera in ten minutes. It’s a cardboard box with a piece of stiff cardboard jammed inside to hold the light sensitive material. The ‘film plane’ can be slid in the box to achieve focus. The lens is a rather large Fresnel magnifier costing $10. Where a pinhole is usually about f/200, a big magnifying lens is like f/1. Bright image, but very narrow depth of field.

I did some tests and was disappointed to find that household ammonia cleanser was not strong enough to develop any images made in bright sunlight, even though the exposures were for 5 minutes. Maybe the paper is out of date? Maybe I need pure liquid ammonia? Using pure ammonia in a closed room with kids sounds punishing, and probably dangerous. Then I bought ‘Sun Paper’, which is a more sensitive diazo paper with a layer of dry developer activated by water. This paper works great in bright sunlight at 8000 foot candles, but it took a one-hour exposure in my box camera. I decided diazo paper was not going to work in a camera, so we just did the activity by making photograms in direct sunlight.

The ‘true photography’ activity for young kids didn’t work out as originally planned, but before throwing the box camera away, I decided to play with it. I tried exposing RC enlarging paper with it, and did make one image that I contact printed. Interesting. But the projected image in the box was more compelling, so I set up a cell phone in the box to capture it. The cell phone was set on a 10-second delay to allow me to close the box.

Here’s a photo made by exposing enlarging paper in the box, processing it, and using it as a paper negative for a contact print. This was one of last photos I took of Sherlock. She passed away at age 12 in early July, 2025. She was, by all accounts, the world’s best dog.

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