The pinhole camera in which the lens is no more than a small hole poked in the side of a cardboard box -- light-tight of course -- has always had a small following from artists interested in the spooky, foggy, romantic and antique images that it can produce.

Have a look at Rob Gardiner’s blog to see some charming examples of pinhole camera art taken around London.

If the idea has appeal then Czech blogger David Balihar has a full set of instructions, in pdf, for making a 35mm pinhole camera from stiff paper. Balihar has a gallery of his own pictures on his blog.

Pinhole cameras are about as low tech as cameras can get but the low resolution bug is also biting some more adventurous owners of phone cameras. Much is being made of the role of the phone camera in capturing the drama of the London Underground terror attacks, more or less as they happened, but there is also a developing interest in the phone camera as a tool for the serious photographic artist.

Robert Clark, an American professional photographer who has done work for National Geographic and Time and is no stranger to high tech cameras, set out in February to cross the US and Canada with a Sony Ericsson S710a phone camera to record what he sees. Clark’s images are being posted as he travels. The results prove that the technology of the apparatus is not as important as the artistry of the photographer.

The SonyEricsson camera is a 1.3 megapixel affair with an 8x digital zoom, a specification that is laughable even as an entry level point and shoot digicam these days. Clark pushes the limits of the capabilities of his little camera and produces beautiful images.

Australian photographer, Laurie Davis, on his first trip to Europe carried two camera phones – a SonyEricsson K700i and a K750i – and the spectacular results can be seen on Laurie's web site. The K750i, with a 2 megapixel sensor, is verging on being a serious camera.

Most camera phones are as primitive as a pinhole camera when compared with the 14 megapixel full frame digital single lens reflex that professionals use. However Samsung are already promising a 5mp sensor for phone cameras to be ready within the next few months and the French company Varioptic reckons that its true optical liquid zoom lens will be the ideal optic for tiny cameras in the future. The irony is that as the technology improves the romantic challenge of making art with primitive equipment will be gone.

There will come a day when photographers in search of a novel medium will be scouring the op-shops looking for obsolete 1 mp phone cameras and publishing their results on the Web.

*