12-03-08 – Pinhole Camera

yeah, with digital, you get far worse diffraction, and there’s really not a lot of ways to combat that.

you can try making a larger hole and put your camera on aperture priority to let it take an appropriate amount of light in.

There is a reason not many people use pinholes. I think that the quality get better as the film size gets bigger, but the aperture gets much smaller. (Smaller than f/200?!)

Yeah, I think film size is a big factor, most of the good stuff I’ve seen has been medium/large format. However, it is possible to do some really stunning stuff with pinholes. These are from one of my Flickr contacts:

http://flickr.com/photos/kentmercurio/tags/pinhole/

I made a pinhole “lens” today. While I looked at several sources, I think that I just copied how one guy did it. I drilled a smallish hole in the center of a camera body cap. Then I cut out a circle from an aluminum can several mm smaller than the inside of the cap (I think that an even smaller disc would be better to allow more area for tape to stick). I then sanded both side of the aluminum to make it a bit thinner. I used a sewing needle to make the smallest hole I could. Sanding down the bump before the needle actually penetrated seemed to be helpful. Working on the inside of the cap, I just lined up the tiny hole in the middle of the larger one in the cap and pressed down the tape.

Here it is in pictures –

The results were less than stunning. Everything was pretty blurry. I couldn’t match the clarity of corsec67’s lamp.

Here is a macro of the hole in that lens:

The ruler at the top is in mm, so that puts the hole at about .3mm. If you have a laser pointer, shining the laser through the hole can tell you if you have issues other than size, like paint causing too much spreading of the light. (I had that on the first pinhole lens, I forgot to remove the epoxy on the inside of the can.)

I think you are fairly close, though.

As for the dust: dust is more visible at higher f-stops, and these lenses are about f/200, so this is really the perfect “dust test” lens.

Unless I pull off some miracle of insight, I’m going to be sitting this one out. I cannot, for the life of me, make an image that isn’t all diffraction all the time. Certainly nothing I’m happy with.

I feel like I’m almost, but not quite there.

Buried down in the reader comments on some site that suggested dimpling the aluminum and then sanding it back to the desired diameter. It seems to have helped, but now I’m wondering if the 320 grit sandpaper wasn’t fine enough and that if I were to go even finer that might help.

Beer-can lens take one:

I’m afraid I’m out for this one. I am looking forward to seeing what you all come up with, perhaps even more than normal because I’ve got nothing. But figuring out how to make a pinhole camera out of the equipment I have is beyond my ability (meaning available time plus mental capacity) this week. I’ll still participate in the voting though, so best of luck to you all.

one of the things you really gain with a pinhole is everything from right next to the camera on out is in as much focus as everything else. I think the best shots are ones that emphasize that, almost to the point of hokey 3-D movie effects.

I don’t know if I’ll have anything for this contest or not.

I can’t even center my @#$%ing hole.

Think of it as an involuntary lens shift.