How to take your own pinhole pictures?
How to take pinhole pictures?
It depends how badly you want to take them:P
Generally there's two options:
You can build your own pinhole camera using a box or 2 cans of your favorite beer (as far as I know bottles won't work)
Or you can make pinhole lens for you camera (if you have SLR, old analog would be best)
To do this, you'll need lens cover with hole, ( can even be purchased online )
The most important things is to make a right hole.
It can't be too big or too small, would be the best if it was perfect.
Generally, a smaller pinhole result in sharper image, however an extremely small hole can result in blurry image (due to diffraction). Additionally, as the diameter of the hole approaches the thickness of the material in which it is punched, significant vignetting occurs, as less light reaches the edges of the image.
The best pinhole is perfectly round in very thin material.
Wikipedia says it's possible to produce pinhole with sufficiently high quality by using thin aluminum foil and fine sanding paper (I confirm it but many many years ago I used camera with 15cm paper so it doesn't count :P).
When we know the distance from the hole to the material we can calculate how big our hole should be.
It can by done ourselves using the formula
where d is diameter, f is focal length (distance from pinhole to focal plane) and λ is the wavelength of light or use online calculator (for 50mm it would be about 0,3 mm)
I found some Kodak tutorial on making pinhole cameras:
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/education/lessonPlans/pinholeCamera/pinholeCanBox.shtml
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, there's even gallery from Poland
http://www.pinholeday.org/
Polish link:
http://www.pinhole.art.pl/
In my 3 post I'll write which light sensitive material is best (or easiest) to chose and how to develop it.
Some pinhole picture:
I think the best way is to by a slr body (can be broken - should be very cheap) and make a pinhole camera out of it.
ReplyDeleteSome photos look really nice but I wonder how much try and error it involves.
In my opinion some pictures (like one above) look marvelous. I am really surprised by the effects you can get.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that effect can be achieved with a graphics editing software? If yes, all that hard work with pinhole cameras can be skipped, unless someone treats it like a hobby :)
ReplyDeleteRafal:
ReplyDeletePhotoshop isn't answer for everything :) I take photos only with my digital camera and I leave good photography for professionals :)
So I need a pinhole body cap but what if I have DSLR instead of SLR?
ReplyDeleteRafał:
ReplyDeleteNo it's not that easy to achieve. BTW, where's your Photoshop licence? Pardon if you use GIMP :)
Thanks for all the tips on pinhole cameras :) Got nothing to add here.
I personally think that to have one good photo taken by pinhole camera, you probably need to do whole film and then you can choose one or two photos that looks good, unless you're a very good photographer.
ReplyDelete