The shoeshine camera was made from a shoeshine box I picked up at a garage sale for three dollars. I cut the hole for the lens with a circular drill bit then used a Dremel to carve a slot for the film holder to fit. I sanded down the box, stained it then lacquered it. After it dried in the sun, I lined the inside with some black velvet. I took a Universal 35mm, f/2.7 Tricor lens (No. 66831) from an old Universal Mercury II camera that still had a nice and smooth manual aperture, then appropriated a viewfinder from another  camera and mounted it on the side of the box.

I mounted the threaded insert that the lens was screwed into in it’s camera, so I could remove the lens and take pinhole shots as well. The Trees is a pinhole shot and the exposure was about a second. I loaded two 4×5 film holders each with 2 sheets of Fuji Velvia but three of the four sheets were over-exposed. I wanted to test it out before wasting a bunch more film and I only had a box of ten sheets.

It should be duly noted that the camera maintains the functional integrity of its original intended purpose: get your shoes shined while taking a picture.

¹ Can you guess what the engineering flaw is on the viewfinder mount?