Making a pin hole camera...

gumbo-67

gumbo-67

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Terri
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I am doing a project at the moment and i remember a teacher when i was little at school making one of these.. i have looked on the internet and it seems it is not as easy as i seem to remember. i don't have many pennies so don't want to by loads of stuff. Does anyone have any advice?
 
get a body cap for your DSLR / SLR - Drill a really small hole in the middle of it - et voila - now guess the shutter speed (it will be ages) set it on bulb, use a kitchen time to remind you when to unlock it ... and enjoy

Alternately if you want to be old school you can use a pringles tube - paint the lid black , make a pin hole in the centre of the bottom - in a dark room tape a bit of unexposed film to the inside of the lid, attach lid - put finger over hole. Come into light , point tube at subject and remove finger. When exposure is up , stick a bit of duct tape over the hole and return to dark room
 
Thank you Pete i take it i will have to buy the developing kit? (never done that before).
 
Cheapest option for you is probably to convert your body cap into a pinhole "lens". Get a hole drilled in the body cap, 10mm or so should do. Get a bit of drink can about 1/2" square and make a small round hole in the middle of it. The cleaner the hole the better. If funds allow, you can buy pinholed pieces of metal for £15 or a converted body cap for £35 (with an exposure calculator) from http://www.pinholesolutions.co.uk/index.html . Like you, we made pinhole cameras at school but that was a long time ago! If you want a longer lens, extension tubes can be used to effectively zoom in. Might be worth asking in the F&C section about pinhole cameras - they tend to be more a film thing than digital.
 
gumbo-67 said:
Thank you Pete i take it i will have to buy the developing kit? (never done that before).
Click to expand...

If you go the body cap on an old SLR route then you can just send the film in for developing - if you go the pringles tube route then yes you'd have to dev it yourself , I'd suggest using B&W print for that reason if you are going that way.
 
Cheers Nod didn't think of that.. i will look at all of this info. it is just an idea i am toying with may need to put a thinking cap on.
 
yep really need to think about it now.. and there was me thinking it was going to be easy.. my teacher was fibbing.
 
I vaguely remember doing this in phyiscs 40 years ago. We used a big round cigar tin, painted the inside black and used photographic paper directly in the lid of the tin to expose onto, then developed that in trays of er, developer, fixer etc. Bit of a palaver. If im correct in my thinking, doing it this way meant we got a negative image once the paper was processed.
 
I made one in school out if cardboard with a bit of thick black plastic bag with a pinhole for a lens. We used photographic paper and developed directly.
 
Matchbox. Takes about fifteen minutes to make.
 
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