This Photographer Creates Stunning Custom Cameras
One of a kind
As photography nerds, we all love ogling a well-crafted camera. Artist Dora Goodman is no exception, and she’s mastering the art of making cameras look sleek and seductive.
Her incredibly intricate creations have gained her a dedicated following on Instagram, so we sat down with her to discuss her process.
First, she takes a fully functioning, standard camera body and rips it apart, albeit very carefully. From there the rest of the work involved is cutting, grinding and glueing to create a new camera body.
“It takes about two weeks to cover a folding camera with gold and wood,” she said, but if she was making a camera body entirely from scratch then it would take much, much longer.
She first started creating the pieces as an extension of her passion for jewellery, woodwork, design and photography. She utilises her skills and past experience to design and build one-of-a-kind cameras of all shapes and sizes.
Goodman usually finds the cameras and parts on eBay and through suppliers. To fit the requirements for modifications they need to have clean lenses and well-maintained clockwork. “Rollfilm Folding cameras are perfect to work with, because they basically look like jewellery boxes,” she said. “With most of them, the functionality and the image quality is amazing, therefore with all these details given my cameras could be equal part beautiful and practical.”
Her favourite project so far was her customised Zeiss Ikonta. “Since I didn’t like the original viewfinder on the top, I built a cold flash mount on the top of the camera,” she explained.
To modify cameras Goodman says you need to be persistent and have a lot of passion for the project, and plenty of free time doesn’t hurt either. The first camera she made took a year from concept to completion as she currently has a full time job.
Before you get your hopes up about being able to order one of these unique pieces, Goodman only makes them for herself. She explained: “If someone received a camera from me, I’d definitely want it to be special and I would want to make sure it’s in good hands.” However, the next camera she makes will be loaned to photographers for testing purposes (fingers crossed we might get a look in).
This article was first written by Hannah Scott and published on DigitalRev. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more photography stories.
