Konstrukt Your Own SLR Camera for $35

Why pay thousands for a new DSLR camera when you can get a do it yourself experience by building your own old-school SLR (single-lens reflex) camera? A new 35mm camera, the Konstruktor, is available at Lomography—kind of. The Konstruktor is actually a kit that you put together to make your own camera, and it's only $35.

Photography buffs will love this idea: shooting your own old-school photos on a 35mm single-lens reflex camera that you built yourself. But the thing about the Konstruktor is that you don't need to be a professional photographer, or a mechanic, to get started. Everything comes in a deceptively simple to put together kit.

The Lomography website, which is known for promoting analogue camera alternatives in this all-digital world, says the Konstruktor's purpose is to help demystify the process of photography from the ground up. Do you know exactly how the film in a camera works? After you make this camera, you'll have a better idea of the intricate mechanics behind analogue photograph, plus you'll end up with a new fully-functioning camera. Check out the sped-up time lapse video of the Konstruktor being constructed.

The video has the camera all put together after only 15 minutes of work, but the website has gives it a more reasonable one to two hour timeframe for non-experts to assemble it from start to finish. Still, that just sounds like a Saturday afternoon project.

When you get the Konstruktor, the box will contain the main body of the camera in a couple pieces, plus the smaller parts fused to the kind of plastic scaffolding that you'd see in a model plane set. The kit comes with a screwdriver and an instruction manual, and if you've ever put together a model train, plane, or car from a kit, you know what to do from there. Completing the kit experience, the Konstruktor comes with various sticker decals and embellishments to customize your new single lens reflex camera.

The camera, according to Lomography, is no pinewood derby car version of an SLR shooter. It sports two modes, "N" for regular shots and "B" for long exposures, and has a tripod mount on the bottom. It's got an uncoupled shutter release and advance, which allows you to take multiple exposure shots, if that's your kind of thing.

The Konstruktor is Lomography's first SLR camera. Unlike the cheap analogue cameras, like the disposables you buy at the convenience store, single lens reflex cameras are professional models of cameras that have a single lens through which both the viewfinder and film collect light from your shooting target.

If you're interested in building your own SLR camera, but have never constructed something from a kit (or are lousy with instruction manuals) the Lomography website has video instructions covering how to build the lens, the camera body, the insides, and putting it all together.

You can check all of that out, plus galleries of photos shot with the Konstruktor on their website.

Judging from this image, it takes pretty good photos.