Gingerbread Camera With A Sugar Lens Actually Takes Photos… Then You Can Eat It
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
This isn’t your grandma’s Christmas cookies! It’s an edible but fully functional camera whipped up by Canadian photographer Dmitri Tcherbadji using gingerbread and candy, and it comes complete with a sugar glass lens that shoots with Fujifilm Instax Square instant film.
Tcherbadji is a website developer but his love of film photography led him to found the Analog.Cafe blog, per PetaPixel.
The sweet concoction is his second gingerbread camera project, following an edible Polaroid SX-70 model, which, while visually striking, couldn’t actually capture images. Spurred by the lessons he learned from crafting an Instax pinhole camera, the photographer explored the idea of using sugar glass as a lens material after noticing the light flicker in his previous creation.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
“Instant film is excellent for experimental stuff as it can provide feedback quickly,” Tcherbadji tells DesignTAXI in an email.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
“My research showed that it could be possible and that the results would be poor. Nevertheless, this was an opportunity to design my own optical system out of candy, which I couldn’t pass by.”
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
The process began with a functional paper prototype, followed by baking trials to get the gingerbread just right, using a cheese grater for precision adjustments.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
The core of the camera, built around JollyLook’s battery-free DIY Instax Square development unit, had its wooden parts swapped out for cookies.
Despite its sugary composition, the final product manages to produce real photographs.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
While the results are blurry, their soft focus and charming imperfections are a delectable surprise nonetheless, considering how they were baked up.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
Naturally, the project endured its fair share of challenges, from the need to figure out the sugar lens’s focal length to engineering a shutter mechanism, all while having to juggle the limitations of gingerbread as an ingredient for a camera. The experiment racked up a cost of around $220, primarily due to the trial and error involved with the Instax film.
Crafting, forming memories, and filling your home with scents of freshly baked cookies are typical rituals of the holidays, and this gingerbread camera, with its snappability, combines all three in a deliciously unique way.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
The camera’s inventor plans to continue taking photos with the edible gear throughout December, before ultimately sharing the joy with friends by breaking it apart and savoring the treat with them on Christmas day.
Image by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission
To watch the photography project unfold, you can follow Dmitri Tcherbadji’s Analog.Cafe on Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube.
[via PetaPixel, images by Dmitri Tcherbadji and featured with permission]
