Since today is apparently Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, I thought it would be good timing for this guest spot by Stephanie Zettl on the topic of digital pinhole photography.
(I know, it’s the first I’ve heard about it being worldwide pinhole photography day,
but let’s just run with the idea anyway.)
Stephanie, who is one of the top wedding photographers in St Louis, MO, has appeared as a guest blogger before on the Tangents blog.
digital pinhole photography
by Stephanie Zettl
A digital pinhole camera: A little bit of art, a little bit of science and a whole lot of fun.
Confession: I spend a lot of time drooling over new equipment and lenses. I’m always looking for that super sharp lens that lets me see every eyelash of the person I’m photographing. I’d rather have gifts of good glass than jewelry and I believe that the equipment you have does affect your style of shooting.
So when someone sent me an invitation to participate in Worldwide Pinhole Photography day on April 25th, I jumped right on it. It would be both a challenge and educational to work with a primitive camera – a camera without a lens …
How does a pinhole camera work?
The simple definition of pinhole cameras is a light proof box that has a very small hole at one side of the box. Light from a scene passes through the hole, or the center of projection, and projects an inverted image on the other side of the box. That other side of the box is where the piece of film goes to record the image.
The smaller the hole the sharper the image will be. However, since there is no real focus, the image is characteristically soft and the “sharpness” is uniform throughout the image. There is no visible limitation of depth of field.
Since I didn’t want to be bothered with film or developer, I went ahead and converted my Nikon D700 digital camera to a pinhole camera …
What you will need to make a Digital Pinhole Camera
A Digital SLR Camera
Body Cap for your digital camera
Drill Bit (1/8”) and Drill
Thin piece sheet metal (I clipped an aluminum soda can)
Sewing needle
Fine sand paper
Utility knife
Black permanent marker
Black Electrical Tape
With the drill bit, drill a hole in the center of the body cap. The size of the hole is not very critical, as the hole for the exposure will be made in the thin sheet of metal.
Use the sewing needle to make a hole in the thin sheet of metal. Twist the needle back and forth to gently puncture the metal without bending it. The smaller the hole the better. The size of the hole should be about 0.25mm
Cut around the hole and sand the metal with the sand paper. You want to remove the edge or ridge caused from punching the hole in the metal. The hole needs to be smooth and uniformly round.
Use black electrical tape to tape the metal to the back side of the body cap, making sure the hole in the metal is in the center of the body cap. Use a black permanent marker to darken the metal so there is no reflection from it.
Attach to camera.
Exposing your pinhole camera:
Now it’s time for the fun technical stuff. The hole in the camera will give you an f-stop of f200. But what exactly is an f-stop and how do you determine it?
An f-stop (N) is the focal length – f (distance from the hole to the film/sensor plane) divided by the aperture diameter – D (the pinhole diameter). N = f/D
Here is the progression of whole f-stops
1.0 - 1.4 - 2 - 2.8 - 4 - 5.6 - 8 - 11 - 16 - 22 - 32 - 45 - 64 - 90 - 128 - 176
From research, I know that my focal length is about 50mm and my pinhole has a diameter of about .25mm. That makes my f-stop an f200. f/200 = 50mm/ .25mm
The smaller the pinhole (the aperture) the greater the f-stop and the sharper the image will be. (Though as I said earlier, all pinhole exposures are characteristically soft.)
Unfortunately having such a large f-stop requires a great deal of light and often times long exposures. You really do need to use a tripod and shutter release when working with a pinhole camera.
To get my exposure I used my Sekonic L-358 hand held light meter (B&H), to take a light reading. The light meter will measure up to an f-stop of 90. I knew that my pinhole camera had a fixed f-stop of f200 – about 2.5 stops over any reading at f90. A one second exposure at f90 would be approximately 6 seconds at f200. (1 second f90 = 2 seconds f128 = 4 seconds f176 = 6 seconds f200) Since I was working with a digital camera and able use the LCD screen and histogram, I knew I could adjust my exposure if my calculations were a bit off due to the inexact and primitive nature of the pinhole camera.
The results and what I learned:
Because there is no real way to see what your composition is, there is a bit of trial and error to get what you want. (Just another benefit of doing it with a digital camera.)
I also plan on trying it again with a new “hole” that is both smaller and more uniform. I believe that some unevenness in the hole lead to greater distortion in the light rays as they entered the camera. But trial and experimentation will figure that out.
In the end, I was pleased with my results. I’m not a fine art, abstract or landscape photographer so this was an opportunity for me to try something new. It was a great exercise and I plan to go out and play some more with my pinhole camera. I encourage you all to try it out. And please share with us your results.
Stephanie Zettl
update: revisited: digital pinhole photography
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Stephanie, how cool! Thanks for sharing your results and the exact details on how to make this happen~
Comment by Alecia Hoyt — April 26, 2010 @ 10:40 am
I remember pinhole cameras; I think I saw some in the Smithsonian a few years ago:)
You know, I was wondering, isn’t the LensBaby very similar to a pinhole camera? Whenever I use mine I always have to guess at how long to expose the image, since the LensBaby has a fixed, non-electronic, aperture.
Comment by photomatte — April 28, 2010 @ 8:06 pm
Many moons ago I also converted my dSLR into a pinhole camera using a very similar technique to the one that you described above. One small difference is that I used aluminium foil (kitchen/cooking foil) which allows you to create the hole very easily.
Another thing that you can try is adding extension tubes (or possibly even tele-converters) to change the focal length of the pinhole camera, but this will obviously change your exposure settings too.
Comment by Splat — April 28, 2010 @ 9:54 pm
[...] to participate by making a digital pinhole camera. My technical adventures were published on Neil van Niekerk’s Tangents blog. It actually ended up to be a neat little project. And while the images are not award winning, [...]
Pingback by Guest Blogging about Digital Pinhole Cameras » Zettl Photography – St. Louis Photographer — April 30, 2010 @ 9:47 pm
Just a quick note, I like the guide, but when you say “all pinhole exposures are characteristically soft” It’s not really true: the sharpness of the image depends on the “quality” of the pinhole. If you buy a “pinholed” metal sheet from a company that makes them professionally, as opposed to simply doing it yourself, you can get very sharp shots indeed.
Comment by Ollie — May 16, 2010 @ 2:55 pm
[...] Next, a detailed set of assembly steps and settings instructions (tweaking required), which you can find and mull over here. [...]
Pingback by Turn Your DSLR Into A Pinhole Camera | Gizmodo Australia — May 16, 2010 @ 5:36 pm
Awesome idea and so cheap anyone can try it who ones a DSLR. What would happen if you where to place a pin hole in a lens cap, you could compose the shot then pop the lens cap on the lens. Would that work?
Comment by Luke — May 16, 2010 @ 8:34 pm
You can buy very high quality pinholes from optics suppliers for $30-50 (though it might take some fun out of the DIY thing) which should give you much better pictures. Here are links to a couple of suppliers:
http://www.reynardcorp.com/precision-unmounted-pinhole-microns-p-856-l-en.html
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlinecatalog/displayproduct.cfm?productid=1794
http://www.cvimellesgriot.com/Products/Unmounted-Standard-Pinholes-Steel.aspx (My favorite optics supplier)
Comment by Matthew Asplund — May 16, 2010 @ 11:54 pm
From my past making real film pinhole cameras is that you need to make sure the hole really is pretty perfect. Using the aluminium from a can works fine, but when you make a hole with the pin it deforms the metal around the hole and makes more of a crater rather than a hole. what you need to do is get some very high grit wet&dry sandpaper and carefully and lightly de-burr the opposite side of the hole from where you stuck the pin into. This makes a much higher quality pinhole. Please try it out and let us know how it goes as i am curious if this is the reason why the pictures you took were slightly soft focus, which i think it may be.
Comment by Sean — May 17, 2010 @ 4:03 am
[...] Day (http://www.pinholeday.org/), and also our neighbour Neil van Niekerk published this (http://neilvn.com/tangents/2010/04/25/digital-pinhole-photography/) [...]
Pingback by Digital Pinhole | NJ Photography Forum — May 17, 2010 @ 8:52 pm
I’ve wanted to try this technique for a while and bought a spare body cap from B&H so I didn’t ruin the original. I was wondering, does the projected image cover the whole sensor or do you get a circular image you then need to crop into? ie; if you were to create a ‘lens’ using this body-cap pinhole attached to say a toilet role tube, can you have different ‘focal lengths’? what distance away from the lens mount is the furthest away before a circular image results or have I got it the wrong way round?
Comment by AndyH — May 17, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
Ollie – While I’m not a expert at this and you statement is probably true, I think it is fair to say that any do it yourself pinhole camera will have this look.
Sean – Sanding down the metal with the hole in it is one of the steps I mention. The second hole I made was smaller and more uniform and it did lead to some better photos… it does take a bit of practice and precision. However, they still were soft in comparison to using a real lens.
Comment by Stephanie Zettl — May 17, 2010 @ 10:38 pm
i always thought it was complicated, but apparently not that hard
Comment by sir jorge — August 2, 2010 @ 6:17 pm
Drill a hole on the body cover, it’s a simplest way to take digital pinhole picture, but the view angle is too small, with pinhole-ez,you can take wide angle pinhole picture,just like use medium format film.
Comment by Pinhole-ez — August 29, 2010 @ 11:03 am
I made a pinhole lens last night for my dslr. The first one i tried the hole was too big. It took some playing around but by the end of the night i think i got it. I am looking forward to seeing what fun shots i can take with it. Thanks for the post!
Comment by mynameisjennw — October 22, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
[...] for photographers) was picked up by Gizmodo USA, Australia and Japan. See the original article here and the Gizmodo article [...]
Pingback by December 31, 2010 » Zettl Photography – St. Louis Photographer — January 1, 2011 @ 2:44 am
You guys oughta get some cardboard, opaque photographic tape and some film and go the whole way and build the entire camera. It’s easier than you might think.
Comment by Nick Dvoracek — April 26, 2011 @ 7:53 am
Comment by Neil vN — May 25, 2011 @ 7:02 pm