I Built a Camera!

Hi, my name is Sam Cornwell and I'm a photographer, artist, astronomer & inventor. I'd like to share my story with you.

I promise to inspire, teach, question and answer. If you read any of my posts and haven't learnt something new, or felt inspired then I have failed.

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For my first post I'd like to share with you my journey in building a camera from scratch and turning it into a mass produced, marketed and fully developed product. Its name is Solarcan and here this is my story.

It was the winter solstice. Up in Scotland the skies get dark quickly and it's cold to boot. Around this time of year it's typical to feel a void of creativity, some call it a sadness. I recall seeing a friend share a post about making a solargraphy camera out of a beer can. It sparked my imagination because not only was it something I always wanted to do, but it was the perfect time of year to install one to achieve the very best results. I quickly rounded up film photography supplies I had stored in cupboards, caravans and the like and headed to the supermarket to pick up the cheapest beer I could find.

The struggles artists have to go through...

After pouring the weak-as-mouse-pee beverage down the drain (yes, honest) my wife and I got to work on building prototypes. The first 24 we made were either placed locally or given to friends as Christmas presents. As it was the 21st December and we were practically penniless we felt it was a nice gesture.

I made a further 8 in my excitement and decided to list them on a popular arts and crafts selling site for $10 each. Surely people would be interested and want to take part. The reality was far from this though. Not a single solargraphy can sold. Not even one.

Convinced it was something to do with presentation I set myself the task in January 2017 of creating a mass produced, fully sealed, ready to sell in a shop version of the beer-can solargraphy camera. I considered it briefly and with a quick calculation in my head thought it would take around a week and £100 including travel to realise a single prototype which I could expand on.

Oh I was so wrong.

It quickly became apparent that a few quick phone calls and trips wouldn't cut it. I have here a document listing every step of Solarcan's creation in chronological order and it goes on for pages and pages. To be brief, because I'm sure it's not fun reading I ended up spending 4 months realising something that looked so simple.

The Solarcan:

I spent the best part of $5000 on everything I needed to create the first 1000 Solarcans. This included some heavy machinery, several thousand 'raw' aluminium cans, labels, the photographic paper to be inserted inside and more. Even the packaging - which turned out to be one of the most expensive parts - cost good money.

There's no hiding that the Solarcan is built to be the very simplest form of camera you can buy. My intention formed naturally over time into it being as much about a camera as it is a learning experience. For all intents and purposes this is something a proficient and experienced photographer could do themselves, however the intended market for the final product would be digital photographers who wanted to learn more, artists, school children and astronomers.

Solarcan is more than just a camera, it's an experiment in science & art.

So, what exactly makes the Solarcan different? What does it do?

Here's the text printed on the side:

Born from a love of photography, art & astronomy Solarcan is a unique camera designed to produce extreme time exposures that capture the Sun’s path across the sky.

In short, it's a pinhole camera that uses photographic paper (not film) to capture the path of the sun through the sky. Over a prolonged period of time (the optimum being the 6 months from solstice to solstice) the light that passes through the 0.5mm pinhole will effectively burn lines across the sheet of paper on a daily basis.

Earth has a 23.5 degree tilt on its axis and as we orbit the Sun, it appears at different latitudes in the sky throughout the year. The is what causes the Sun to be higher in the Summer and its lowest in the winter.

Once you've finished your exposure / have run out of patience you remove your Solarcan from its installed location, retrieve the paper from inside to photograph or scan and invert the image:

Bringing it to market was the biggest leap of faith I had to make. Having never used the Kickstarter crowd funding platform before but always wanting to I felt this was the perfect opportunity. By crowd funding pledges for single Solarcans and packs of five I'd be able to gauge just how popular they were and how many I'd need to build in time to ship after the fundraiser ended. I somewhat pessimistically set a goal of £2000 with a 30 day time slot to reach it.

We only needed 34 hours!

The type of camera, far from unique had never been brought to market before as a mass-produced product. The Kickstarter was picked up very quickly by the huge design and photography blogs PetaPixel, Designboom, Lomography and more. For a brief period I'm proud to admit it was the most popular photography Kickstarter on the planet. In the end it fielded 1000% of its original goal. I was stunned.

You can view the Kickstarter, which includes a video introduction here: Solarcan Kickstarter

Why was the Solarcan so successful?

On reflection the hard work on Solarcan's design and presentation probably played more of a role in its unprecedented success than I wanted to admit at first. Perhaps I got lucky with the marketing photographs or the low single unit cost. You may remember my original attempt fell flat on its face, which speaks volumes and adding proof that perhaps Solarcan is more a lesson in marketing than invention.

To date 1000 Solarcans have shipped, with another 2000 in the pipeline to prepare in my small gallery-come-factory.

I hope my story has inspired you to do something, create something, or make something. Whatever it is, don't give up the hard work, it's worth it in the end.

Sam.