Some guy named Tinny Logan, whose entire bio is “Quiet, kind, and a little dreamy,” posted a 37-second video of himself building a camera out of a $1 tin of eucalyptus mints and a roll of Kodak film. Twenty-seven million people watched it. That’s not a typo. The internet collectively lost its mind over a guy taping film inside a candy box.
The whole operation is gloriously unhinged in the best way. He starts with a Barrys Eucalyptus mint tin the kind you buy when you’re trying to pretend you’re not about to smoke a cigarette cuts a strip of 35mm film, lays it inside the tin, pokes a tiny hole in the lid, slaps some foil and blue tape over everything so light can’t sneak in, and calls it a camera.
No lens. No viewfinder. No battery. Just a hole. That’s the entire optical system. Light crawls through that pinprick, paints an upside-down picture on the film, and somehow it works.
He then walks this little Frankenstein creation out onto a street in Riga, Latvia, props it on a curb like he’s setting a trap, and lets the city do the rest. The photo that comes out is this soft, dreamy, slightly warped street scene with a dude standing there looking vaguely confused, red flowers in the foreground, old buildings leaning in the background. It looks like a memory you half-forgot. Which, let’s be honest, is more interesting than 90% of the over-sharpened, over-filtered garbage coming off phones right now.
Is the picture technically good? Hell no. It’s soft, the colors are weird, and you can tell the exposure was mostly a prayer. But that’s the point. In a world where every phone has computational photography that can make your sad Tuesday sandwich look like a Michelin-star meal, there’s something almost rebellious about a camera that costs a buck and forces you to actually wait for the picture.
Tinny himself even joked that developing the film probably costs more than the camera. He’s not wrong. But nobody’s watching this video because they want to start a film lab. They’re watching it because some quiet, dreamy guy in Latvia just reminded everyone that you can still make something with your hands that actually does the thing it claims to do. No app. No subscription. No software update.Just a hole in a mint tin and a little bit of sunlight. Wicked little camera. The man might be onto something.
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