Atelier Bonryu(E)
pinhole photography
Laboratory: Pinhole Photography
Taking Pinhole Photographs
- Preparing a Pinhole Camera -
Preparing a pinhole camera: Needless to say, you have to make a pinhole camera ready when you are going to take pinhole photographs. As for myself, however, I take pinhole photographs by using a single lens reflex camera (SLR). Therefore, I make only an interchangeable “pinhole-lens” corresponding to a conventional interchangeable glass lens of an SLR and load it to the SLR camera to take pinhole photographs. (In the following we may call sometimes an interchangeable optical system made of a pinhole plate and a tube as a “pinhole-lens” for the sake of convenience, though it is not a lens.) There are a lot of advantages as described in the following when you take pinhole photographs by using a body of a commercially available SLR camera as: (1) labour to make a pinhole camera is saved, (2) a high sensitivity film can be used easily, (3) setting exposure is easy, (4) one can ask a DPE shop for developing a film instead of developing it by yourself, etc. These are for the case of a silver film SLR camera, and if you use a digital SLR (DSLR) there are some more advantages. On the other hand these advantages spoil your pleasures to do everything by yourself and you may have little appreciation for them. As there are published a lot of books on do-it-yourself pinhole cameras I would not describe such pinhole cameras in this site.
Interchangeable “pinhole-lens”: The easiest way to take a pinhole photograph by a conventional SLR camera is to use a “pinhole-lens” made of a body cap of the SLR camera. The “body-cap pinhole-lens” is made by drilling a hole larger than a pinhole at the center of a body-cap of the camera and attaching a thin metal (alminum or brass) sheet with a pinhole to this hole. Though it is very easy and simple if you use only one “pinhole-lens”, a lot of body-caps are necessary if you are to take photographs by using different “pinhole-lenses”, such as those with a different pinhole size, a different focal length (length from a pinhole to a sensor) or, sometimes, a zone plate or a double slit, which will be described later. In order to cope with this inconvenience I am using an “interchangeable pinhole-lens system”. For this purpose I made a “pinhole-lens adapter” by using a body-cap and a tube of cardboard. Then I made an “interchangeable pinhole-lens“ by attaching a metal sheet with a pinhole to a cardboard tube with a smaller diameter than the adapter tube, which can be inserted to the adapter tube leaving no space between. “Zone plate-lenses” and “double slit-lenses” are also made in this way and by using this “interchangeable pinhole-lens system” I can handily take zone plate photographs and double slit photographs as well as pinhole photographs.
