my other passion.

You could say that making things out of as many different materials as I can think of is definitely my passion but there is another passion that I have had for several years now which is photography. I was given my first film camera about six years ago and at first I just liked having it because it looked old-school and accessorized very well with my 'look'. I began taking my camera everywhere and when I eventually taught myself how to use it properly by setting up the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc I became obsessed with photographing pretty much everything I saw. A few years later I received an SLR digital camera from my parents as a gift and from that day I became best friends with my Canon Rebel XSI named 'Wallow' (as cheesy as that might sound, its true).

 

When I took a metals class last semester at SDSU, one of our projects was to make a reliquary out of metal that held a very precious object of yours. When I thought about reliquaries, chests and boxes came to my mind immediately (which is what most of my classmates made); I decided to take a different approach on this reliquary. Since photography was one of my passions, I wanted to make something that related to that so I came up with the idea of making a metal camera that held film. 

Making a camera out of metal that actually looked like a camera was not an easy process. I had to learn new metal-working techniques such as scoring and bending which was the most essential since I was working with a geometric figure that involved many straight angles. After I made the camera I wanted a clever way of housing my object so that it would not just be lying inside. I remembered that you are able to see the image of a negative film strip when it is help up against light, so I decided to make a window that let light through into the reliquary and hit the hanging film strip so that one would be able to view the image. Here is a photograph of the reliquary in action. Hope you guys like it!