Whoooh… this one’s to toy­ing around and experimentation.…

It’s been a while since I played around with the idea of build­ing a pin­hole cam­era. The cheapest way to do this (if you hap­pen to have a D-​SLR) is to just buy a cheapo body cap for the cam­era (that’s a plastic cap that you can cover the front of the cam­era with if you have no lens attached) and drill a hole into that.

Now with pin­hole pho­to­graphy, you need a very small hole to make the whole thing work. And the best way of achiev­ing this is to actu­ally put a lar­ger hole into the cap (say 3mm dia­meter), and then stick some alu­minium foil over the hole. Then you pierce the actual, tiny hole with a needle into the tin­foil. The cleaner, rounder, per­fect the hole, the bet­ter the sharper image you get out of it. I’ll post a photo of my cam­era with the mod­i­fied cap later on.

The funny thing with pin­hole pho­to­graphy is that you have super small aper­tures (in the hun­dreds or two-​hundreds!), which means two things: 1) pretty much infin­ite depth-​of-​field, i.e. everything is in focus, from right in front of the cam­era all the way to infin­ity, 2) very long shut­ter times (because of the small aper­ture).

The photo above was just some toy­ing around in the liv­ing room, fir­ing my flash­gun into my face in a few dif­fer­ent spots while expos­ing for about 20 s. It’s quite blurry, but I’ll have a few more attempts at pier­cing a bet­ter hole (some people actu­ally use lasers for that!).