Old camera steals the spotlight as a vintage lamp

Once in a while, a prized family treasure lands in your hands.

In Kala’s case, it was a Canon AE-1 35mm camera.

And she did not want to just stash it on a shelf or stick it in a box somewhere. It needed pride of place in her home.

After some brainstorming, she ended up making it into a lamp that’s now a cool conversation piece in her living room.

She added the camera to the lamp without any damage to it. The camera can be removed from the lamp should she ever want to use it.

VINTAGE CAMERA LAMP WITH 35MM SLIDE SHADE
IKEA item used:

IKEA LAUTERS lamp

IKEA lauters
Photo: IKEA.com
Other materials:

Camera
Hot shoe mount adapter bolt and nuts
Elevator bolt
Lamp harp
European lamp harp saddle
Furniture tacks
Box catches
Silhouette Cameo
Printable transparencies
Printer
Cardstock paper
Jump rings (or wire, jump ring mandrel and wire cutters)
Misc.: sandpaper, stain, spray paint, glue, tape, washer

You can view my full step-by-step tutorial on Instructables but briefly ….

… here’s the plan

plan

The first was to get the LAUTERS lamp from IKEA. It was perfect as it had a disk in the middle where she could sit the camera.

To make that happen, she cut the brand new lamp in half with a hacksaw.

Next, she aged the look of the lamp with Rust-Oleum’s Kona wood stain. Before staining, she sanded everything with a fine grit sandpaper to remove the varnish. Then, distressed the wood and made some random scuff marks with nails and a hammer claw.

Attaching the camera to the lamp stand

Fortunately, there’s a hot shoe on the top of the camera. A hot shoe is an attachment point for a flash.

Kala drilled a hole into the bottom of the smaller lamp disk that was deep enough to fit the majority of the hot shoe bolt, then glued the bolt in place. Once the glue dried, she slid the bolt base into the hot shoe and tightened the nut to secure the top of the lamp to the camera.

attachments
Hot shoe at the top | Tripod support at the base

At the bottom, she used an elevator bolt to feed into the tripod socket.

And the camera was set!

VINTAGE CAMERA LAMP WITH 35MM SLIDE SHADE
Next was making the 35mm slides

This step is optional if you already have 35mm slides or you can buy them off eBay.

Kala made her own slides by printing photos using cardstock, transparency film and her Silhouette Cameo. The details can be found here.

shade

Once you have all the slides, attach them to each other with jump rings. Attach them in strips of 4.

For the shade, she replaced the LAUTERS shade with a new lamp harp, which allowed her to support the shade from the top.

VINTAGE CAMERA LAMP WITH 35MM SLIDE SHADE

Each section of the spider lamp ring held 5 strips of photos. In total, this shade used 75 photos!

When all the rows were attached, the lamp was finally complete.

VINTAGE CAMERA LAMP WITH 35MM SLIDE SHADE
VINTAGE CAMERA LAMP WITH 35MM SLIDE SHADE

The end result is a unique way to display a beloved item and a conversation starter.

See the full tutorial.

~ by Kala Peterson