New photography hardware Innovation

Boncomp Ltd, a Finnish Turku-based start-up, has developed a product based on thousands of year’s old Camera Obscura -phenomenon. The use of this product, a lens attached to a window, has now been viewed over 1.9 million times on TikTok -social media platform.

Tommi Pirnes, the inventor of the product, states the following:

“Camera Obscura is an age-old physical “darkroom” phenomenon. You can turn your room into a giant camera only with a hole in a wall. I have developed a lens that can be attached to a window to amplify this effect. You can find a similar effect in the anatomy of the human eye, and the modern digital camera is based on this same phenomenon as well.”

“Our customers who have used this say that the effect for projecting the landscape naturally to the whole room is a very immersive experience, almost religious. Your natural wall painting is living around the clock and year as well, like nature itself.”

“I got frustrated with the traditional camera obscura images since the projection, i.e., the landscape is always upside-down on the wall. So, I developed our latest product, the BonfotonUP -kit, to correct the image right-side-up. The optical system includes two interchangeable lenses and a custom-designed 400-gram glass prism for flipping the image upright. I love the idea that now anybody can try take Camera Obscura images like the great photographer Abelardo Morell”

“Currently, the products are manufactured in my garage here in Turku, Finland, and they are already shipped globally to photography enthusiasts, artists, and teachers, for example.”