[caption id="attachment_901" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Madli pilt Mooste koolist"][/caption]

During these very grey November days, hoping and waiting for the snow and sunlight, the matchbox camera workshop was held at MoKS. The good reason for this was having someone practiced in the mentioned craftwork – Daniel Allen – here as part of a two-month residency at the end of 2011.
So as planned, on Saturday the 26th, a small group of people gathered to learn the secrets of this strange craft. See the gallery below!

The process itself is not actually very complicated - just fairly. Here are main supplies you need:
- an empty matchbox – to cut different size of holes in different parts;
- a little piece of foil (stronger than cooking foil) and a pin to make a hole;
- a black pen to colour the inner parts of the box to avoid any light being reflected anywhere;
- some card to build the shutter;
- a film, of course, and also one old empty film cassette;
- black tape to make your camera fully lightproof;
- and a bit of sponge and half a clothes peg – for spooling the film from one cassette to another smoothly and successfully.

I would say the most difficult part, requiring most assistance needing, is getting the size of the pinhole (aperture) right – to be able to match it later with the approximate shutter speed in certain light conditions.
One of the most beautiful things about taking the photos with such a camera is the game between predictability and unpredictability. One takes pictures of the chosen subjects usually very consciously and also recognises most of these things later on the photos. And there are some extras as well that appear as certain effects (which can emerge from the “mistakes” made while building the camera). Actually there’s hardly any outcome that wouldn’t have these extras – in most cases, I would say, enriching the results.
It should be said that once the film is full of pictures, the camera has to be destroyed to get out the negatives. The good part of this is, however, that if you became good friends with the relations between aperture, light evaluation and shutter speed, you can re-use the same pinhole – as you remember, it’s the hardest part – to build the next camera.

And some more good news is that if you are interested, then please keep an eye on MoKS' activities in winter-spring 2012 – we are planning to have more of these workshops!

[nggallery id=33]