Pinhole Photography

I wanted to attempt to make my own pinhole digital camera using my old Sony a7 so I came up with a plan for this little project yesterday.  I've been toying with the idea of doing some film pinhole photography but, for various reasons, I didn't want to go that route at this time.  I'd prefer to start on the digital side of photography for this project.  This was simply for testing the waters plus a small project to do.  It turned out to be a bigger project than I anticipated but it still was only a half day of work...  which is about all I can handle on a good day!

I had been searching online for a manufactured pinhole cap but couldn't find any available anymore.  There used to be all sorts of ones on the market but not anymore.  I assume the borderline criminal and poorly planned tariffs have affected this commercial market.  Now there are fewer lenses and fewer cameras available in the US today.  Tariffed retail prices have increased so high that we have lost the ability to even purchase many products especially products related to science because the manufacturers are no longer shipping to the US.  These manufacturers have estimated that the US market wouldn't support the significantly higher prices so they are selling to the rest of the world instead.  

The US doesn't manufacture these products and hasn't for decades nor will the US go back to that.  Personally, I don't think the US workforce is even skilled and educated enough to manufacture high numbers of photographic and scientific products.  I've noticed the same with telescopes and microscopes.  The market for scientific and photographic supplies in the US has been destroyed by the current Administration so, in an attempt to see if I might even like pinhole photography, I set about making what I need myself here at home.

I often make things myself but I usually do this for two reasons.  First, I'll make something on my own in my own design because I can make the item better and/or tailored to my own preferences.  If I can't make it better (for my needs), then I purchase commercially available products instead.  And second, I might make something myself simply for the challenge.  In this case, I'm forced to make something myself solely because the US supply of this type of product has been eliminated from the US market.

The primary reason I didn't want to make something myself is because a finely manufactured pinhole "lens" (it has no glass so, technically, it is not a lens but I suppose that is how I will refer to it here) will be far better than anything I can put together.  The pinhole will be finer if manufactured... the pinhole will be cleaner if manufactured...  the product will have a glass covering to keep dust out of my expensive camera rather than just a rough, open-to-the-air pinhole.  More on the dust problem later.

I collected the tools and supplies I would need yesterday and then started working on it this morning.  

First, I drilled a hole in one of my camera body caps...  I think I drilled a 3/8" hole.  (That reminds me...  I need to order a couple of new body caps to replace this one.)  Well, actually, first I needed to find the exact center of this cap so that I could make sure the pinhole is as centered as possible.  After marking the center, I drilled the hole.  It turns out I really didn't need to be all that precise because the drill bit wandered on me so it was not centered anyway.  I had to fix this by using some round files to file the hole cleanly and more centered.  This was already becoming too much work for this project!

Next, I cut a section out of a Coke can.  I had to sand off the coating that is on the inside of the can as well as the paint on the outside of the can.  In the end, I was left with a piece of aluminum that was only 0.08mm thick.  My goal was to get it down to 0.1mm thick or less so this was a success.  Like the previous step in this little project, this took more time and effort than I wanted to put into this project but I was making headway.

Next, I carefully hand-drilled a 0.1mm hole in the aluminum then carefully sanded it a bit more to remove any burrs left behind.  The aluminum was so thin after all my sanding that it could crease, crinkle and tear fairly easily especially while sanding it.  

After getting all the sanding out of the way, I cut it down into a small square so it would fit behind the hole in the camera body cap.  I taped it into the cap and then used a black Sharpie marker to blacken the inside to minimize reflections.

Unfortunately, the marker clogged up the hole so I needed to very carefully use a tiny pin to clear out the hole.  I'm definitely too old for this!  My eyesight isn't good enough and my hands are too shaky.  I used a magnifying glass to help with my vision and breath control helped to steady my hand.  I carefully cleared out the hole but I probably enlarged it slightly too.  

Now I was able to see light through the hole...

Here is the goofy-looking homemade thing mounted on my Sony a7 camera body...

I grabbed a tripod and headed outside with the camera to capture a couple of photos through this tiny pinhole.  My shutter speed was at 0.3 seconds with an ISO of 800.  This new pinhole "lens" appears to be in the range of around a 20mm focal length so it is quite a wide view and that makes this tiny pinhole an f/200 aperture...  20mm divided by the diameter of the hole (0.1mm) make it an f/200 aperture.  But, since I may have inadvertently enlarged the hole to around 0.15mm or 0.2mm that would bring the aperture down into the f/100 to f/133 range. 

Here are the first couple of pinhole photos...  

Then I came inside and captured another photo.  For this photo, I put two extension tubes between the pinhole and the camera which changed my focal length to around 35mm.  My exposure was at 30 seconds and my ISO was at 800.  I then painted the can of brushes with a flashlight during the 30 second exposure...

Honestly, although the pinhole photos are not horrendous, I was left a bit disappointed.  When I was painting the can of brushes with light I realized that perhaps what interests me more than pinhole photography is long exposure photography.  This prompted me to grab a 35mm lens and mount it on my camera with a 10 stop neutral density filter so I could use a long exposure using a typical 35mm lens.  The long exposure would give me enough time to paint the scene with a flashlight rather than using very bright lights and a short exposure.  This "painting with light thing" provides softer lighting.  Now, this, really interests me more than the blurry pinhole photos... 

When I come back to this blog entry later to see the photos again, I probably won't be so critical of the pinhole photos.  Yes...  they are blurry but that is to be expected and is actually a desired feature of pinhole photography.  There are no glass optics involved to focus the image so the images should be a bit blurry.  Also, the hole is so small that there is quite a bit of diffraction happening too which also makes things blurry.  Blurriness and dark vignetting are the typical features of pinhole photography though.  

That being said, I think my hole is either not clean enough or too large because I feel that these images should not be as blurry as we see here.  I might try to keep searching for a commercially manufactured pinhole lens that is covered by glass though.  

Since my pinhole is open to the elements, my sensor quickly became covered with dirt and dust!  It is windy out there today so I'm not surprised by all the dust I found on my sensor just after this one short session.  This alone is a good reason to purchase a manufactured one that has filter threads so I can mount a glass filter on it to protect my sensor.  I keep my gear in pristine condition so I find this dust on my sensor to be quite annoying and frustrating.  For this reason alone, I'm not too fond of this type of homemade pinhole photography!

EDIT:  Before I even saved this blog entry and published it, I started wondering if I could effectively and easily edit the photo directly above to appear like a less blurry pinhole photo... 

Creating a pseudo pinhole image was pretty easy and I like the results better than the true pinhole photo.  When editing on my computer to make a photo look like a pinhole photo, I can adjust the amount of blurriness.  I can also apply the blurriness unevenly and affect some areas more than others as I see fit.  In short, I have far more control doing it this way which is an advantage. 

This turned out to be a really useful project and exercise.  Having captured true pinhole photos, I can now easily and effectively edit any photo to accurately look like a pinhole photo by using the true pinhole photos as a reference!

On a nicer day, I might wander outside with my homemade pinhole "lens" again... preferably to shoot a more interesting scene than just a few trees in our backyard.  I'm thinking if I drop the ISO to 100 (I was at ISO 800 for the landscape photos above) so I can shoot with a much longer shutter speed when it is less windy out there the images will probably look slightly better,  Images at ISO 100 should be a bit sharper than images at ISO 800 too because of the little bit of noise that is introduced at ISO 800 so, theoretically, I should be able capture nicer photos to use as reference photos.