The box is very nicely finished and has a cool sliding top!
It's made by the "My Father Cigars" from Nicaragua and according to the box the cigars are totally made by hand..but aren't they all?
I'm not a cigar smoker, but I do appreciate the boxes they come in and often prowl cigar stores looking for cool boxes to convert into pinhole cameras. You can often find a really nice wooden box for a buck or two depending on the box and how much the guy behind the counter wants for it.
There's a nice cigar store in my area where the owner knows what kind of boxes I like and puts them aside for me. He thinks it's pretty cool that the boxes have another life as something else. I do too!
This box was on that popular auction site and I only paid 2 dollars for it. Shipping was 4 dollars so I've got 6 bucks invested. Not bad for a finger joined box that would have taken me half a day to build!
The box is perfectly sized for a 4 x 5 sheet of photo paper or film to lay inside and with the addition of some black foam-core as a light tight liner--it's ready to go!
I drilled a 5/8 hole in the lid and then taped a teeny pinhole inside the lid that I had hand drilled in some brass shim-stock. Viola! Pinhole camera!
The box is about 3-7/8 inches deep, so with a .018 pinhole, that works out to about F/215.
With Direct Positive Paper my exposures are going to be in the neighborhood of 60 seconds.
Tomorrow, I hope to take it out for a test drive, and of course I'll post the resulting photo here.
In the meantime, here's the box. I love the design on it.
I'll probably just use a piece of tape for a shutter for the time being.
I like cigar boxes for all kinds of things, but pinhole camera making is one of my favorites. And now that I'm buying my own cigars by the boxful online, I'll have more boxes to play with. It's amazing how good a build quality many of these have, with tropical woods, considering they're just a container for a product that gets consumed up in smoke and then it's gone.
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