I spent a day with Dave Faulkner from Alfie Cameras shooting his new camera, the BOXX. It is a small wooden box camera built specifically for black and white paper reversal, with film holders that double as portable developing tanks. You compose on ground glass, shoot onto a sheet of photographic paper, then pour chemistry into the holder itself to develop the print right there. No darkroom. Just you, the camera, a few bottles of liquid, and somewhere reasonably flat to work.
For anyone who has watched the paper reversal stuff on this channel, this should be obvious why it caught my attention. Up to now the route into the process has been a darkroom (mine, or a community one) plus a large format camera plus a lot of patience. The BOXX collapses most of that into one wooden object you can take to a field.
Here is everything I learned from shooting one.
What the BOXX actually is
It is a small box camera, shooting on pre-cut 6x9cm photographic paper, with three lens options and a film holder design that lets you develop in the holder itself. The body is wood, varnished and stained, painted black inside, with brass fittings and a sprung back to hold the film holder firmly against the body. There is a ground glass on the back for composition.
The film holders are the clever bit. They look like standard sheet film holders, but they are sealed chambers with a spout in the side. After you have exposed your sheet of paper and flipped the dark slide to its closed position, you pour developer through the spout. The chamber holds the paper in place at the bottom (it is pinned, not floating, so you do not lose it down a drain). You shake the holder gently, let the chemistry do its work, drain it out through the spout, wash, repeat with bleach, clarifier and a second dose of developer. The image appears in front of you, in daylight, by the side of the road, with no darkroom anywhere in sight.
A baffle inside the holder near the spout stops light getting in while you are pouring. The whole sequence takes about ten minutes per sheet, or per batch if you are working on a few at once.
![PLACEHOLDER: the BOXX with one of its film holders open, showing the developing chamber and spout]
The philosophy, briefly
This came up in conversation with Dave and it is genuinely worth surfacing because it explains the design. The point of the BOXX is full immersion in the photographic process. You compose your image on ground glass. You choose your lens. You drop in your aperture (literally drop it in, more on that in a second). You expose using the lens cap as a shutter. You develop the print right there with your own hands. Every step is yours.
This sits in deliberate contrast to throwaway digital, and to AI-generated images, both of which we talked about quite a bit. There is a growing appetite for tactile arts where you end up with a real physical object that you made yourself, and the BOXX is squarely aimed at that audience. Whether or not you find the anti-AI framing convincing, the process itself is genuinely engaging in a way that scrolling through Lightroom catalogues is not.
The three lenses
Three options at launch.
The 100mm Wollaston. A single-element meniscus lens, the kind William Hyde Wollaston designed in the early 1800s for landscape work. Convex one side, concave the other. Wide open is about f5.6, and you set the aperture using Waterhouse stops, which are small metal plates with a hole of the appropriate size that you literally drop into a slot in the lens. The lens is focusable from one metre to infinity. This is the most engaging of the three to use because the ground glass image is bright and clear and you have proper depth-of-field control through the Waterhouse stops.
A counterintuitive note on the Wollaston: Dave found it actually produces slightly better results when mounted backwards, concave side out, despite the lens having been beautifully machined for the conventional orientation. Optics being optics.
The 55mm periscopic. A prototype on the day I shot it. Two glass elements mounted back to back with a fixed f16 aperture between them. The two elements correct each other’s aberrations, which is the trick of the periscopic design. Focusable from 0.5m to infinity, lovely wide field of view on 6x9 paper. There is a vignette in the corners which Dave says was the price of keeping the lens affordable (eliminating it would have doubled the cost), but it is atmospheric rather than ugly and to my eye it suits the kind of images this camera is for.
The pinhole. Includes a feature I have not seen on any other pinhole I have used: a separate preview aperture alongside the actual pinhole. The pinhole itself gives you almost nothing usable on the ground glass because the aperture is so tiny. The preview hole, slightly larger, projects a blurry but visible image you can use to frame the shot. Then a small magnetic shutter swaps you over to the pinhole proper for the exposure. It is simple, obvious in hindsight, and brilliant. I genuinely cannot think why nobody else has done this.
![PLACEHOLDER: the three lens options side by side, with the Waterhouse stops visible next to the 100mm Wollaston]
Paper, ISO and exposure
The camera is designed around Ilford Multigrade resin-coated paper, which Alfie will be supplying pre-cut to 6x9 with each kit. You can use other paper but you need to cut it to size.
Dave initially rated the paper at ISO 3 and found he was getting slight overexposure and lower contrast than he wanted, so on the day we were shooting he was rating it at ISO 5 instead, with shorter exposure times. Working in good sun this got us into the half-second to two-second range with the Wollaston at f16 to f32, which is short enough to be practical without a tripod for stationary subjects.
The lens cap is your shutter. You uncap, count, recap. With exposure times of half a second and up, this is easy. A metronome app on your phone, with the click set to one beep per second, helps.
There is no built-in light meter. You meter with your phone, or by sunny-16 rules of thumb, or with whatever spot meter you already own. Most of the time we were just doing the maths in our heads.
Shooting it
The whole experience is slow and deliberate, which is the point.
Set up the tripod. Mount the camera. Open the back to see the ground glass. Pull a dark cloth over your head if you are being thorough, or just use your jacket if you forgot one. Frame and focus using a loupe on the ground glass. Lift the loupe out, close the back. Drop in your chosen Waterhouse stop if you are using the Wollaston (the bigger the hole, the wider the aperture). Slide the film holder into the back. Uncap the lens for your exposure time. Recap. Flip the dark slide to expose the developing spout.
Then comes the bit nobody else has built into a camera at this size. Squat down next to your tripod, pour in the developer, gently agitate, wait, drain. Rinse with water. Bleach. Rinse. Clarifier. Rinse. Open the holder lid, drop in the second developer, and watch the positive image emerge in front of you, in daylight, on a wall or the boot of a car or wherever you happen to be.
![PLACEHOLDER: the BOXX set up on a tripod with someone composing on the ground glass under a dark cloth, on location]
The actual results from the day
A mixed bag, which is honest reporting and also kind of the point.
The first sheet I shot with the Wollaston at f32, half a second, on a stone archway. Came out lovely. Sharp, good tonal range, the kind of soft-shouldered highlights you get with the paper reversal process at its best.
The wide angle prototype on a long exposure of the same scene came out well-exposed but with a small light flare blob in the centre, which I think was sun catching the front element directly. The vignetting on the 55mm is real but, as Dave said, atmospheric.
A handful of underexposed sheets where I had not pulled the lens cap fully clear of the lens and there was a shadow effect, or I had got the exposure time wrong.
The shot I was happiest with was a portrait of Dave leaning against a stone wall. Wollaston, f8, half a second. The wide-open aperture and the meniscus lens give a particular kind of soft-corner sharp-centre rendering that suits a portrait. Slight blob of development residue on his forehead which I would call atmospheric and Dave would probably call my fault.
One unexpected detail: every print has a pink residue around the very edges where the holder clamp prevented chemistry from reaching the paper. It is a clear tell of how the holder works and I would call it a feature rather than a defect, but if you wanted to scan and crop your final images you would crop these edges out anyway.
![PLACEHOLDER: a small grid of three or four of the final prints from the day, showing the range from good to atmospheric to overcooked]
Can it shoot other things
Two questions I asked Dave on the day.
Sheet film? In theory yes, but the ISO difference is brutal. Paper is around ISO 5; conventional film is more like ISO 100 to 400. Your shutter-via-lens-cap technique stops being practical at typical film exposure times. If Alfie ever offer a proper shutter as an option, sheet film becomes viable.
Glass plates or tintypes? Maybe, with some modification. Plates are physically thicker than paper, which throws off the focus plane (the ground glass and the paper surface need to be at the same flange distance from the lens). With the pinhole the focus tolerance is wide enough to get away with it. With the focusable lenses you would need a different depth ring at the back of the holder to compensate. Dave said if there is demand he will at least provide CAD files for the modification so people can 3D print their own.
Other lenses? The lens plate is designed to be replaceable, so in principle you can mount almost anything. I want to try adapting a 120 folder lens with a 3D-printed cone, and Dave was open to the idea. Treat it like a large format camera with a tiny image circle and you can experiment.
Who this is for
If you have been curious about black and white paper reversal but the darkroom barrier has put you off, this is the camera that removes the barrier. You can be shooting and developing inside an afternoon, without owning a darkroom, without owning a large format camera, with the chemistry included in the starter kit.
If you already shoot paper reversal in a darkroom, the BOXX is not going to replace that workflow but it might extend it. The 6x9 negatives are small compared to 12x16 portraits in a darkroom, but the ability to develop on location, in front of your subject, with no darkroom return trip, opens up shoots that would otherwise be impractical.
If you mostly shoot conventional film and you have no interest in paper reversal, this is not the camera for you. But you probably knew that already.
Availability
The BOXX launched on Kickstarter in 2026 and reached its funding goal quickly. By the time you are reading this, the Kickstarter may be closed; if so, Alfie Cameras at their main site is where to look for retail availability. The starter kit is designed to include everything you need to begin, including paper, chemistry, and the kit components shown in this article.
Dave is also the person behind the Alfie Tych, the half-frame 35mm camera I covered on the channel some time ago. The Tych was a clever piece of engineering but it never quite fitted my way of shooting. The BOXX is the opposite. It is squarely my kind of thing, and I genuinely may have to buy one for myself once the first batch ships.