Digital Pinhole Lens on a Serious Budget
Wednesday 24 Jan 2007
Each day I’m becoming more and more a photography junkie. Just the other day I broke down and bought a Lumix DMC-FX7 camera (more on that after I’ve had enought time to thoroughly test it) to add to my arsenal. I love my Nikon D70s, but carring around 50lbs of camera equipment isn’t always fun or practical, nor easy to set up to get those quick snaps. Now I’ve got something sleek, portable and spyish to carry around in my pocket 24/7.
That said, however, I did make my first pinhole lens for the Nikon. It was painlessly easy and cost me a whopping $7.84 (by far, the least expensive lens in my collection)! I’ve known of pinhole cameras since my first shoebox and piece of film, but never considered digital pinhole cameras…
I ran across a few sites describing do-it-yourself instructions on making a pinhole lens using a body cap. So I broke the bank, found the best bargain I could on eBay and paid my $4.85 plus $2.99 shipping for my brand new Nikon BF-A1 body cap.
For those not familiar with pinhole photography, it’s the simplest camera to make and operate. You can make a pinhole camera from nearly anything. I’ve heard people using shoeboxes, cardboard boxes, buildings, even their own mouth!
The technology is simple; use some type of container for your camera body, fix a piece of film to the inside back wall and punch a small hole in the opposite end. There are many ways to calculate how large or small a hole to use. For my lens, I went with a hole a little larger than .25mm. The smaller and more perfectly round the hole, the sharper your image will be. In fact, there are companies out there that make precision, laser-cut pinhole lenses that are incredibly sharp (considering there’s no corrective glass lens!), but that’s too high falutin for my first pinhole lens, and a little to rich for this project (they usually go in the neighborhood of $35-65).
Making the necessary modifications was a no brainer. The trick with making one of these is to center your hole for the “lens.” If the hole is not centered, you’re likely won’t achieve proper exposure across the frame of your image.
To do this, I simply measured the width of the cap at it’s widest point and etched a line arcross the back of the cap at this diameter with an exacto knife. I did this several times in several different directions. The place where the lines intersect should be the dead center of the cap. To make the actual hole, I used a push pin from my memo board and started boring into the plastic cap. It took me all of about five minutes. When I managed to work the pin completely through the cap, I sanded down both sides of the hole and made sure I didn’t have any obstructions in the hole. Here’s the finished lens:
I made quite a few test shots from the studio, here’s one of Bobula, my wooden people model… and yes, he does run like a girl.
To make this shot, I set up my D70s on a tripod and used a shutter release cable. I set the shutter speed to 15 seconds. I’m planning on using this one a good bit. I love the soft edges and the diffused colors. It reminds me a bit of my Lensbaby, without the extra work of manually focusing the bellows-stlye lens. I’ll post more sample pics up here as I capture them.
One thing to keep in mind when using a pinhole lens on a digital camera, there’s nothing to protect the insides of you camera from dust. Additionally, I did notice that the long exposure times needed to take a picture with this lens allows any dust on the camera to show up extremely well in your pictures. Make sure you’ve got good Photoshop skills for processing!
chris | Art, Photography, Reviews
