Though slightly discouraged from my previous experience in shopping places, I still wanted to focus on the problem of intense and costly shopping, costly to the individual and to planet Earth.
As a boy who grew up in Malaysia, where in most households including mine did not celebrate Christmas, the only time I gave presents if any was during a family member’s birthday. Friends birthdays never necessarily called for a present, only the family. And in my family, I was taught since childhood by my mother that the best way to give someone a present was to make one. I did not necessarily like the idea at the time, especially when receiving. My mother would urge me to make her a card for her birthday, she would tell me that she really wanted one, and I remember her being very happy upon receiving it, at least she showed it that way. Until today, I have never bought my parents a single present. So like my mother did, I want to encourage people to make their gifts, not buy them. Handmade gifts are more thoughtful and personal, hence will be better appreciated as compared to giving just another consumer product. You can buy something someone you know needs, but then again they can buy them themselves. “Waste issues go beyond the consumer, they start at the raw materials stage and continue after disposal stage” Borromeo, L. (2013). By making your presents, you would save both the private and environmental costs that inevitably arises when buying them.
The pinhole camera is the simplest possible camera. All it is is a dark box with a tiny hole on one side of the box, and a piece of film or photographic paper on the opposite side. Simple ones are incredibly easy to construct, some easier than the birthday cards I made for my mother. In the 21st century, a camera is a complex piece of tool, expensive in most cases, too sophisticated and fragile for children to handle. But it isn’t necessarily the case, I believe a pinhole camera can be assembled and operated by a 12-year old with a simple set of instructions. All the necessary materials can be found from the waste we produce over Christmas ; boxes, cards, aluminium cans, strings and ribbons. I want to encourage and inspire people to stop buying gifts and to make them instead. In modern times with heavy industrialisation and mass production we are grown to believe that home made presents aren’t good enough anymore, that a good gift should come with price tag. There are plenty of things which can easily be made by an ordinary person without specialized skills in whatever it is, the pinhole camera is one example. It is unbelievably easy to make. Simple, yet powerful. Compared to a modern camera, a pinhole camera seems to the vast majority of the people an obsolete item, they begin to imagine a dark, blurry and indistinguishable image, they think that it is incapable of producing good results. But the truth is in fact the contrary. With the absence of a lens, a pinhole camera has infinite depth of field, everything in the frame, whether inches away or in a distance will be in focus. A pinhole camera has no lens distortion( a major problem with camera with lenses), wide angle images remain absolutely rectilinear. What better gift to give than a personal, home made gift made by recycling everyday items, a tool capable of producing beautiful images.
zenkhyeooi 