Pinhole and I have never quite gotten on. I have tried. I had a Thingyfy pinhole lens for my Sony A7R2 a few years ago and it bored me, then I made a pinhole lens board for my Intrepid 4x5 and the results came out so blurry they only really worked from the other side of a room. The whole 4x5 thing rather went to waste on negatives you would not want to enlarge.
So I had filed pinhole under “interesting in theory, not actually for me” and moved on. Then Steve Lloyd handed me his new pinhole camera at the inaugural Analogue Spotlight event in Worcester in May, and I changed my mind.
This is the Chroma Cube66, a 6x6 medium format pinhole that fits in a coat pocket and shoots images with real character. It is the first pinhole camera I have wanted to keep using after the test rolls came back.
What the Cube66 actually is
Steve Lloyd makes Chroma Cameras out of his workshop in the UK. He started with the SnapShot 4x5 and the modular 679, then a 35mm Cube pinhole, then a pair of bigger 6x9 and 6x12 cameras. The Cube66 is his first medium format pinhole. It launched at the Analogue Spotlight event the week I met him, which is also where I bought mine.
The body is 3D printed and finished with acrylic panels. It weighs 200 grams with film loaded. It has a 30mm focal length and a 0.2mm pinhole, which works out at f/150. The field of view is roughly 85 degrees, which is wider than almost any wide-angle lens you have shot before.
The pinhole itself is not made by Steve. It is a 0.2mm laser-drilled hole from Reality So Subtle, the French pinhole specialist whose work turns up in a lot of the better pinhole cameras around. So when I joke on the video that Steve must have used some more delicate means than I did with a needle and a strip of brass, the answer is that he subcontracted to someone with a laser. Sensible move.
The clever details, in no particular order:
- A sliding shutter on the top plate. Push to expose. Pull to close. As Steve describes it, if you can see a hole in the sticky-out bit, the shutter is open.
- Frame lines drawn into the top plate and the side of the body, showing the field of view. You cannot see live through a pinhole, so the lines tell you exactly what the camera is seeing, which means you do not have to imagine very hard.
- A bubble level embedded in the top plate.
- A magnetic back held on by neodymium magnets. Give it a firm tug and the whole back comes off. Which means you can change film without dismounting the camera from the tripod.
- A 49mm magnetic filter thread adapter that snaps onto the front, letting you use standard screw-in filters. It is also compatible with Chroma’s TriChroma triple filter system if you want to make trichromes.
- A rear red window with a sliding cover, for frame numbering off the backing paper.
What it does not come with is a take-up spool, which is fair enough because most photographers using one of these will have a pile of empty 120 spools sitting in a drawer somewhere. I certainly do.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Chroma Cube66 on its tripod showing the top plate frame lines, bubble level and sliding shutter]
First roll: FP4 at St Arilda’s, Oldbury-on-Severn
The first shoot was at St Arilda’s churchyard in Oldbury-on-Severn, a small country church a short drive from me that I have shot several times before. It is set among long grass and old gravestones and has a tower I have never quite worked out how to photograph well. The 85-degree field of view of the Cube66 was, I thought, going to help with that.
For exposure I used the Mr Pinhole website. I metered with the Sekonic at f/8 and translated up to f/150. A reading of 1/250 at f/8 became roughly a second at f/150. Long by daylight standards, but absolutely fine when you are on a tripod with a bubble level and not trying to catch movement.
I shot twelve frames in the churchyard. Several came out lovely. The wide field of view did exactly what I hoped. A low frame across the long grass with the tower rising up the right side, with everything from a foot in front of the lens to the trees behind the church somehow in (let us call it) acceptable focus. Pinhole does not have a focal plane in the conventional sense. Things are as sharp at one foot as at infinity, which is to say nothing is truly sharp but everything is interesting.
The final frame, naturally, was a selfie. Twelve frames in, you have to.
![PLACEHOLDER: pinhole frame at St Arilda’s, low angle in the long grass with the church tower rising on the right]
Switching to colour for the second roll
For the second outing I went into a small wood with very different light. By this point I had a question to test. Was the camera also sharp enough for things close to the lens, or would the same problem as my old 4x5 pinhole board emerge.
The other decision was the film. With FP4 at ISO 125 I had been running into seconds-long exposures, which meant reciprocity failure territory. With black and white film, reciprocity failure essentially means underexposure. You compensate by giving more time. With colour film it is worse. You get underexposure plus a colour shift, because the different layers of the emulsion react to reciprocity failure at different rates. I had shot a portrait on colour film a while back at around fifteen seconds and the result had a definite green-yellow shift I had not wanted.
So I loaded a roll of Fuji Pro 400H. The faster film would keep my exposures in the four-or-five-seconds range and out of the worst reciprocity territory. It would also let me test the camera on a different kind of subject.
(For anyone reading this later, Pro 400H was discontinued by Fuji in 2021. Mine was from stock I had bought when the writing was on the wall.)
Second roll: woods on Pro 400H
The woods turned out to be what the Cube66 wanted. Trees and dappled light. Paths leading away into the canopy. The wide field of view caught huge volumes of forest in a single frame, with the depth that pinhole does so naturally. Everything in a sort of soft focus that the eye reads as real, even though it technically is not.
The close-up test was, to my genuine surprise, fine. I went up to a tree with someone’s name carved into it a long time ago and got the camera about two and a half feet away. Four seconds of exposure. Sharp enough to read the carving. Sharper than the 4x5 pinhole board would have managed. So whatever Reality So Subtle are doing with their laser drilling, it is producing meaningfully better images than my drill bit and a scrap of brass.
Two frames from this roll really worked. A path running into the trees that came out looking like a still from a quiet film. And one looking straight up into the canopy that I had to crouch under the tripod for so as to keep myself out of the frame.
![PLACEHOLDER: pinhole frame on Pro 400H, path leading into the woods]
![PLACEHOLDER: pinhole frame looking straight up into the canopy]
Two complaints, both already fixed
I had two gripes coming out of the shoots.
The first was the lack of tension on the supply spool. With nothing pushing back against the take-up side you cannot really get a tight wind. The roll feels loose in the body and frame spacing can drift.
The second was that the rear red window does not seal fully light-tight when open. I wound on in bright sunshine with the cover open and caught a faint streak across two frames. Solvable in the field by winding on with your back to the sun.
I emailed Steve about both and got back a very Steve response. He had spotted the tension issue already. Mine was effectively serial number 0002 and his own serial number 0001 had the same problem. He had a fix in the pipeline. He had added support around the supply side and a spring on the take-up side. He had also changed the bottom pressure plate to hinge as two independent parts, making reloading easier out in the field. He offered to retrofit my camera with the new parts and I took him up on it.
This is the kind of customer service you cannot replicate at scale. Chroma is essentially Steve and his 3D printers, and that is part of the appeal. If something goes wrong he is the one fixing it. If something is improved he gets in touch. I had also exchanged emails with him before I had even met him in person, on unrelated things, and he had always responded personally and quickly. Worth knowing if you are considering one of his cameras.
Verdict
The Cube66 is the first pinhole camera I have used that I want to keep shooting. Not as a curiosity. As a camera. It has personality. It has the practical features that matter (frame lines, bubble level, magnetic back, filter thread). It is small enough that there is no excuse not to take it. And the results have real character without being so blurry as to be unprintable.
There are two things I want to do next with it. The first is selfies using flash. This solves the two-handed shutter problem, because you can open the shutter on a tripod, walk into the frame and fire a flash to make the exposure. I have done some calculations and I think my studio flashes will give me enough power to make this work even at f/150. The second is shooting it in less obvious light. The woods worked, the churchyard worked. The next test is something with more direct sun and stronger shapes.
Buy it if, skip it if
- Buy it if you have wanted to try pinhole but never found a camera that produced images you actually wanted to print
- Buy it if you already shoot pinhole and want something genuinely pocketable for 120
- Buy it if you want to support a small UK maker who will personally answer your emails
- Skip it if you want maximum precision from your pinhole work, you would be better off with one of the larger Chroma cameras or a dedicated Reality So Subtle body
- Skip it if the f/150 aperture and the need for a tripod outside the brightest sun puts you off
What’s next
I have a queue of cameras sitting on a shelf waiting for serious attention. A 4x5 Speed Graphic with the Dallmeyer brass lenses on custom lens boards from Simon Forster. A 3x4 Speed Graphic for dry plates. A Pentacon Six with a plan. A Seagull 4A TLR picked up on auction with a missing aperture arm and a bodge fix ahead of it.
And there is a Bronica S2A wearing a Meyer-Optik Trioplan 100mm f/2.8 on another Simon Forster custom adapter, because apparently the Trioplan has a cult following for the bokeh it makes and I want to find out why.
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