I love my Canon 10d. Someday when they make cheap 20 megapixel cameras I will hate it, but for now, it is all I'm shooting with.
I only have 1 lens for my camera, a cheap Sigma zoom lens, but yesterday I made another one with a generic $2 camera body cap, a few pieces of gaffer tape, and a brass shim with a hole poked in it. Well, I guess it's not a real lens, but it has increased my camera's repertoire a bit. I spent all afternoon taking digital pinhole camera photographs.
The wonderful thing about pinhole optics is that there is no focal plane or depth of field. No matter how close or how far away an object is, it is always equally in focus - there's no "falloff" of focus, as there is with glass lenses. Since the hole I used was relatively big (the diameter of a sewing needle), and sharpness is related to the size of the pinhole, the images my camera takes are all in focus, yet nothing is sharp.
The pinhole is big enough that on a sunny day (or if I let my eyes adjust) I can actually see through the pinhole lens so I can tell what I'm taking a picture of. All my film-based pinhole cameras rely on luck and Polaroid film to know what you're taking a picture of. The long exposure and small amount of light coming through make for an interesting film-grainy texture and desaturated colors. It really looks more like film than film does sometimes.
See if you can guess what this is without looking at the filename.
Pshaw. Too easy. A piece of navel lint magnified 1,185 times. Amazing, nonetheless. ;) Great shutterbug, you.
Posted by: rumbanik on July 25, 2003 01:05 PMIt looks like a plant species from another planet.
Posted by: beca on July 26, 2003 10:18 AMi thought the the Canon 10D was 6.3 mega pixel, not 20 (or did i miss a technology update?)
-j
Posted by: josh on July 27, 2003 09:09 PMSo fantastic! Have any more to share? I love the alien look it lends things.
Posted by: meriko on July 29, 2003 08:56 AMApparently this has gotten linked, so I thought I'd give a little how-I-did-this summary. If you have questions, you can post a comment!
If you want to make a digital pinhole camera, you need a camera that has a removable lens (I have a Canon digital SLR). You can try taping a pinhole over the lens of your digital camera, but I can't vouch for the results.
For the pinhole, you need to get brass shim material at a hobby or hardware store (it's almost like tinfoil, really thin small sheets of brass - you can actually cut it with scissors) and poke a piece with a needle until it makes a small bump but doesn't totally go through the shim. Then you sand the bump off with some fine grit sandpaper and you end up with a nice flat sheet of brass with a teeeeeny tiny hole. Get a body cap for your digital camera (my Canon 10D takes standard EOS caps which are cheap) and cut a big hole in it, then tape the brass shim with the tiny hole over the big hole in the body cap with some black photo or gaffer tape. Then screw the body cap onto the body of your camera. Voila! Digital pinhole camera.
Depending on the amount of light you have and the size of the pinhole you made, you may need to set the camera to a shutter speed between about second (full sun) and 30 seconds (indoors) and start snapping. Post a link to the pictures here if you do it!
Also, digital is fun and all but nothing compares to the real thing. Chuck at pinholecamera.com is a darling and makes incredibly high quality 4x5" sheet film pinhole cameras out of wood. I have two. A wide-angle version will give you gorgeous vignetting and a huge negative to work with, while a telephoto version can give you extremely long exposures for an eerie abandoned look and more control over your cropping.
Posted by: kia on November 5, 2003 08:28 PMdoes anyone have any examples of what these body cap pinhole camera photos look like? I'm very very interested to see.
thanks
I just made a pinhole thingy on my Canon D30 today. I used a lens cap from an old T* mount lens (I already wrecked my body cap making a Contax to EOS adapter). Anyways, I made a fairly large hole in the lens cap, then got tinfoil and poked a very small hole in that and taped it over top of the lens cap. The hole for mine is fairly big so I'm trying to get it as small as I can to get sharper photos. I used a sewing pin to prick the hole.
I don't have any photos of it, but I think you can probably picture it.
Posted by: Steve Simons on July 1, 2004 01:42 PM