Making A Pinhole Camera

A pinhole camera is one of the oldest pieces of equipment in the history of photography.

Such a camera has no lens, but light travels through a very small hole and on to the film plane or digital sensor.

Some even fret about chromatic aberration, astigmatism and the uneven spread of light over the recording surface. These are the concerns of serious lens designers but for a pinhole camera they are a load of nonsense.

A pinhole camera is about fun and a creative effect, so anything goes and we should embrace the unexpected. We are after artistic decisions here not technical perfection.

Making the pinhole

• The pinhole should be made in a piece of thick aluminium foil.
  Foil used for food containers is usually thicker than normal cooking foil. Better still, use a very thin brass shim.

• Lay the metal on a flat piece of lead, or failing that, on a piece of flat hard wood.

• Use a new sewing needle.

• Pierce the needle vertically down into the foil.
  The further the needle is pushed through, the bigger will be the hole.

• For the first attempt, make the hole as small as possible, using just the sharp tip of the needle and not the whole shaft.

The idea is to take some test shots with this very small hole and see how they look.
A very small hole will give a sharper image with better resolution.
A larger hole can be made to the second series of test images.

• Drill a quarter inch (8mm) hole in the centre of the body cap.

• Tape the foil / shim on to the body cap, on the inside.
  Position the pinhole centrally over the body cap hole.

• The inside of the foil should be painted with matt black paint to prevent internal reflections. Only go to within a millimetre or two of the hole itself. If any paint goes over the hole, it will degrade the quality of the hole.

• Dust is a problem with digital cameras, so we need something to cover the pinhole. Although the hole is very small, we should still guard against any dust getting it.
  Take a small piece of blue-tac; flatten it and use it as a lens cap.

Our high-tech lens is now ready for action.

Using the pinhole camera

With a modest speed setting, such as 100, start with an exposure of 1 second in sunshine and see how it looks in the preview.
Adjust exposure as required and bracket exposures as well.

Process the images the normal way in Camera Raw. Use the Exposure and Black sliders to set highlights and shadows and set first sharpening.
In Photoshop, you might want to increase contrast and increase colour saturation or you might prefer to keep the colours soft and muted; that'll be down to taste and the type of image.

If you want a wide-angle pinhole camera, then you will need to use a technical or monorail camera where the lens panel can be moved closer to the film plane.

Quality of the image varies. It can depend on:

• the size of the hole:

• how clean and accurate the hole is;

• and how much processing is done to the image afterwards.

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