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When Shaun Irving goes on vacation he doesn't have to worry about forgetting his camera -- he'll be driving it.
Irving has built what he believes to be the world's largest traveling camera on gas-powered wheels. It's certainly the only camera that gets 15 miles per gallon.
He constructed the machine, dubbed Peanut, out of an old mail-delivery truck he bought on eBay and surplus military parts, including a lens that came straight from a submarine periscope. The camera truck takes photos that are 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide -- more than 3,000 times larger than the typical negative.
It's essentially one step above a pinhole camera, the standard prop used in introductory photography classes. Irving composes his images by driving closer to or farther away from his subjects and stands inside the camera to make the images.
"It's amazing to be inside a camera as it takes a picture," said Irving. "You step in there, shut all the doors, and you see this projection of everything outside ... only it's upside-down.
"I don't believe in magic, but this is probably the closest thing to it."
Irving plans to hit the road with Peanut soon, driving cross-country from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to San Diego. He wants to document America's weird and wonderful sights in a series of 300 giant photographs.
He also plans to make stops at local schools and community group gatherings along the way to teach kids about the wonders of photography.
"I want kids to see Peanut just because it's cool. I've done photography for years, and I understood how cameras work," Irving explained. "But when you step inside one, it's so much easier to understand.
"Plus, when I was growing up, photography seemed undoable to me -- too complex and too expensive. You need a fancy camera, you need enlargers and film holders and darkrooms ... or so I thought," he said.
"But the truth is you can make a camera and a darkroom out of very little. Give kids some photo paper, the right chemicals and some direction, and they can make some mind-blowing photographs."
Since graduating from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia in 1997, Irving has -- for reasons unknown even to him -- been obsessed with the idea of building a giant traveling camera.
"Everyone I know, myself included, has questioned my sanity while doing this project," Irving said. "I'm an idea guy, and I'm constantly coming up with harebrained schemes. But this was the scheme that just wouldn't go away, the one I knew I'd have to try just to see if it could be done."
In early 2003, Irving invested his $5,000 savings into a 1987 mail truck and the assorted lenses, paper and chemicals he needed to make his scheme a reality. He quit full-time work in April to focus solely on construction of the camera.
"The whole experience has been, well, scary. I think fear of failure was my biggest motivation to make sure it worked right," said Irving. "I knew that, yes, technically it could be done. But it was still a huge jump for me to buy a truck and start drilling holes in the side of it."
By mid-July, he had taken his first giant photo, which wasn't a success.
"I'd designed this complex system to develop it, which of course failed miserably," he said.
Irving eventually opted to use a much simpler developing system, which involves sponging the developer and fixer chemicals out of two big buckets and onto the negative. He works under a 1930s darklight he bought at a yard sale for five bucks.
"When I finally worked out how to do the developing it was just great watching this giant image emerge with super-sharp detail in all the right places," he said. "And it was just a relief to finally have a print, knowing that yes, this is a real camera and not just one that might work."
Peanut is a fixed-aperture, fixed-focal-length camera with a singlet (two large lenses, one convex, one concave) lens. The shutter is a sheet of metal that slides between the two lenses to block out the light.
When Irving is ready to make a picture, he hangs a large sheet of standard photographic paper, which he buys in rolls 4 feet wide by 100 feet long, on the wall opposite the lens and opens the shutter, typically for about seven seconds.
Peanut produces a negative just like you'd get from a typical camera, except it's translucent instead of transparent and, obviously, it's much bigger.
"People have told me I should try to patent Peanut," Irving said. "But I'd be glad to see others go out and do what I've done -- even on a larger scale. Anytime you can do something that gets people interested in photography, I'm all for it."
Irving is hoping to attract corporate sponsors to finance his planned cross-country trip.
But even if worst comes to worst and he has to bankroll the expedition on his own, he figures he can always sleep inside his camera.
