Kelli Anderson This Book Is A Camera

This is the best new product we've seen this year and we're not alone.

It was also described as one of the most clever design objects by Wired magazine.

This design project by Kelli Anderson, has made a working Pinhole camera from an educational pop-up book that combines the skills needed for design, science, structure and function.

The book explains and actively demonstrates how a structure as humble as a folded piece of paper can tap into the intrinsic properties of light to produce a photograph.

The convex surface of the lens of a normal camera merges light beams from a varying angles to produce focus at the focal point. A lensless camera accepts light through a single hole in a flat plane (from a single angle.) Because of this, there are no mechanics to focus a pinhole camera - it is a projection from a single beam, much like a camera obscura. The result is that objects near the camera and objects far away from the camera have the same exact amount of focus.

The book itself comes with detailed instructions and a starter pack of B/W Ilford photo paper (any 4?5 inch or smaller light-sensitive material can be used). There is nothing to assemble, but if you want to use it as more than a book, you need to feel alright with the concept of pouring developer into an old takeout food container and sloshing it around in the dark... while counting.