How to take pinhole photos with a digital camera

Pinhole photography is a fun and old-fashioned way to capture photos. It’s the original form of picture-taking, and the results are unique and often surprising. A pinhole camera is simply a lens-less camera that takes a picture by focusing light rays through a tiny opening.

Why shoot pinhole photography with a DSLR?

When you turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera, in a way you’re combining the best of both worlds.

Traditional pinhole photography can add an unexpected twist to your photos, but you can’t see the results of any adjustments you make in real time. When you shoot pinhole-style with your DSLR, however, it allows real-time adjustments that the analog process can’t match.

Supplies you’ll need.

To turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera, you only need a few materials that you likely already have on hand:

• A digital camera with interchangeable lenses
• Aluminum foil
• Needle or thumbtack
• Scissors
• Marker
• Tape

How to convert your camera to a pinhole.

First, you’ll need to remove whatever lens you have on your DSLR. Then:

1. Cut a small piece of foil to cover your lens mount (approximately 4×4 inches).
2. Use the front cap of your lens to trace a circle on the piece of foil. If you don’t have your lens cap, do your best to estimate the size. Cut out the circle, leaving some extra space around it.
3. Next, you’ll create the “pinhole.” Take the needle or thumbtack and pierce the smallest possible hole in the center of your circle.
4. Finally, use tape to adhere the circle to your lens mount. Try to keep the foil as smooth as possible, and make sure you don’t cover the pinhole in the process.

Once you’ve successfully adhered the foil, you’re ready to try out your pinhole camera DSLR.

Discover other helpful tips and techniques for capturing unique photos.

Edit like a pro.

See what you can do with Adobe Lightroom to transform raw images into stunning photos.

Last Sunday (30th April) was ‘World Pinhole Day’. So I decided early on that my photo story this week would be about pinhole photography.

Initially, I’d planned to take and show some pinhole photographs. But as I played with the idea, I realised that the more interesting story was about the making of the pinhole camera.

So think of this as a DIY Photography story.

Sadly, connoisseurs of pinhole photography are about to go apoplectic.

Rather than build a film camera, I decided to use my digital camera and convert it into a pinhole camera.

Here’s the step-by-step.

Step 1: Get your materials together

(Left) Start with a lens body cap and drill a small hole in the centre. I bought mine pre-drilled on eBay. This can’t be used as the pin hole for the camera: the hole is too big. You now need to cut a small square of aluminium foil or a piece of aluminium can. You’ll use this to create the actual pinhole.

My wife had some very fine needles that were perfect for creating the pinhole.

Step 2: Create your pinhole

You can create a pinhole ‘screwdriver’ by sticking one end of the needle into a pencil eraser.

Twisting the needle ‘screwdriver’ creates a reasonably round hole.

Step 3: Check your work

(Left) I used loads of gaffer tape to hold the pinhole in place on the lens body cap. I decided against fixing the pinhole to the inside of the body cap as I didn’t want to risk threads of gaffer tape falling off and sticking to my sensor. (Right) The hardest thing about the whole procedure is centring the foil pinhole over the lens body cap hole. If you don’t centre it, you end up with a lot of vignetting.

I checked the size of the pinhole by scanning the cap and measuring the dimensions in Photoshop. I calculated the effective aperture as f/134. Take that Ansel Adams.

Step 4: Build your camera

This is easy. Just put the body cap on the camera and voilà!

A sight that only a photographer could love.

Step 5: Take photographs

Now for the fun bit.

The images on the left show the set-up shot. With the body cap attached, you can’t see anything through the viewfinder. So to compose your shot, you need to use Live View (or you could just point and guess). The right hand images show what came out of the camera, with a little post-processing to boost the contrast. Quite astonishing, given there’s no lens.

Here are some images I took using this set up. I discovered that the best pinhole images need really bright days with lots of hard shadow. One advantage of using a digital camera is you can boost the ISO sensitivity and hand hold the camera (not really possible with film pinhole photography).

Obligatory artistic shot of a shadow.

The odd blur in the centre of the frame is my dog who moved around during the 4sec exposure.

Self portrait with pinhole camera. This was taken with a flash at a high ISO setting (ISO 3200). I put the camera on a 4sec exposure and then triggered my flash remotely for this portrait.

Pinhole tribute to Henry Fox Talbot

The image below left is a photograph (‘The Open Door’) taken by the inventor of photography, Henry Fox Talbot. (Unless you’re French, in which case you mistakenly think Louis Daguerre invented photography).

I thought it would be fun to recreate Talbot’s image with the pinhole. My attempt is on the right (there’s a larger version at the top of this article).

About the Author

David Travis is a portrait and editorial photographer based in Staffordshire, UK. In 2017, he publishes a photo story each week, and you can check out the project here. For more of his work, visit his website, follow him on Instagram and 500px, and like his Facebook page. This article was also published here and shared with permission.

My pinhole photography is created with a camera that is nothing more than a light-tight box with a tiny hole that projects an image on film. There is no lens and no viewfinder. A pinhole camera boils photography down to its simplest components: light and composition, a huge contrast to today’s digital photography. As a former photojournalist, I worked with digital photography since its very beginning. In contrast, my pinhole photography is the oldest form of photography.

The limitations and simplicity of the pinhole makes photography new again for me. This simplicity continues to teach me invaluable lessons about photography and the way I see the world.

Cameron has been honored with numerous awards for his pinhole photography at art fairs. He has participated in some of the top art fairs in the country with this unique approach to photography.

Starting out in Pinhole Photography

My first pinhole camera made from a cigar box

Early on I realized there were a lot of nature photographers in the art world. I decided to push myself to try something new few others were doing. I had been batting around the pinhole photography idea in my head for a couple years. I knew I could take photos with a pinhole camera, but wasn’t sure if it was even possible to take good enough photos to get into good juried art fairs. In school at the Art Institute of Colorado I had done one pinhole photo for a class assignment, but hadn’t since.

I ordered 4×5 film and chemistry online and the day it arrived started looking around my office for something to make into a pinhole camera. I found a cigar box in my closet, made it into a pinhole camera and after a few tests in the backyard to figure out the exposure, was ready to take a photo. I remembered there was a nice bench in a park nearby our house. I walked up to Owen Conservation park with my cigar box and made a 3-minute exposure. Seeing the first results of my pinhole experiment , I was immediately hooked!

Boo’s photos that she’s taken with a pinhole camera are some of my favorite ever. They almost remind me of Sally Mann’s work.

A photo Boo took of her horses:

There are two posts that led up to this post:

So once the photo paper has been exposed how do you develop it? Here’s an overview of darkroom supplies needed(click image to download the printable version):

Darkroom supplies you can find them at the below links. You’ll be able to use them over and over again (except for the photo paper):

Supply & Source Links: (all of the dark room materials and film paper will run you about $85.00)

A bathroom or laundry room without light
A small desk lamp

At this stage you’ve carefully loaded the black and white photo paper into the pinhole camera and opened the shutter to expose the paper. The most important thing here is to WAIT until you are back in your dark room set-up to remove the paper. If you open up your camera and remove the paper without using the safelight in a dark room you will ruin the photo!

This is our easy setup in a hall bathroom:

This works great because the materials easily pack up into a box for storage and we can bring them back out again when needed:

The most important part of the setup is that there’s no light coming through into the room. This is why we use a safelight. (I also put towels around the bottom of the door where light leaked in.) I just replaced the bulb in a desk lamp with the 11W Red Safelight Bulb:

And then basically we have three trays:

And three kinds of chemicals: Developer, Stop Bath and Fixer

And three containers for the mixing chemicals (ratios for mixing will be on each bag of chemicals):

Once all your chemicals are mixed you’ll put a small amount in each tray, enough to cover the photo paper when it’s dipped down into the solution. Keep the trays in the following order:

Now:
Close the door to the dark room.
TURN OFF THE LIGHT.
ONLY THE RED LIGHT SHOULD BE ON.

Carefully remove the photo paper from the pinhole camera and dip it down into the first tray. And follow the following directions:

While the lights are out you might as well reload the pinhole camera for another round of photos! Once the paper has gone through the fixer in tray #3 you can turn on the light to rinse under warm water. Boo getting ready to transfer her photo to the sink for rinsing:

This is what the photos will look like at this point. They are still in their negative form:

There is a whole process for creating the final print where you take the negative and put it together with another piece of photo paper and expose it. I will cover it at some point but for now I am going to show you the digital process for creating the final print. I scan the negative into a photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or iPhoto and then invert the image:

A sample photo with their negative:

Hope all of that is straight forward enough. Let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. I created this handy little guide sheet to help with the development stage. Click here to download the PDF or click the image below:

The whole series is indexed here:

About Ashley Hackshaw

Living a simple, creative life in #smalltownusa Bryson City, NC. Renovating a 1960s ranch house and an old train depot. Thank you for reading! Read more in my about section.

Have a camera body cap lying around collecting dust? Did you know that you can easily turn it into a do-it-yourself pinhole lens? Matt from Blue Mantle Films created this 1.5-minute video tutorial that shows how.

The basic gist is that you’ll need to punch a hole through the center of your body cap and then cover that gaping hole with a metal circle cut from a soda can. A tiny hole punched through the soda can serves as the pinhole for the lens.

Here are some sample images showing the look that you can get with this type of custom pinhole lens on a digital camera:

“I recently became curious about pinhole photography, and decided to make my own DIY pinhole photography lens,” Matt writes. “The first iteration was just an old credit card that I poked a crude hole in — the pictures from that one were terrible — but as I started to refine the process and to experiment I eventually came to this iteration.”

As cameras continue to increase in their quality, definition, and focus, vintage photography has become somewhat romanticized. Just like how music lovers appreciate the crackle of a vinyl record over YouTube to mp3 recordings, modern-day photographers apply imperfect filters to their Instagram posts. Sepia, polaroids, film: it’s all vintage, and it’s all trendy. So, what happened to the lost art of pinhole photography?

What is pinhole photography?

If you didn’t take photography in high school and are hearing ‘pinhole’ for the first time, here’s a quick definition of how it works. All you need is a lightproof box with an aperture (pinhole) and a light-sensitive material on the back of the box.

In a dark room, tape some film or paper to the back of the camera (box), then take the box outside and face the pinhole towards what you want to capture (use a tripod for a sharp image). Keep it there for a few minutes, then take the pinhole back to the darkroom to take the film/paper out and get it developed. Obviously, there’s a lot more to pinhole photography than this, but this is the basic gist.

What’s so good about Pinhole Photography?

What made pinhole photography so exciting to me was how bare bones it was. Pinhole photography strips back the art of taking photos to the necessities: light and composition. It also doesn’t let you preview the image you’re taking. That’s far too advanced for pinholes! But that element of the unknown was the beauty of the thing.

There was this riveting excitement as you finally got to develop the image. The image could be a total dud, or it could be an immersive depiction of an environment, seen like never before! With pinholes, you could also experiment by mixing static with movement during the photo-taking process to create intriguing results. Take a look below:

Image: Steven Dempsey

Why are pinholes are a thing of the past?

So, why has pinhole photography crawled back into obscurity? It feels strange, considering how vintage filters are commonplace online. Not to mention the number of polaroids found at indie house parties.

The lack of pinhole action is probably due to the effort and materials needed. To develop pinhole negatives, one needs access to chemicals and a dark room, which isn’t exactly on every street corner. The light-absorbing process also takes a while, so it’s not like you can quickly take a pinhole photo at a party either. While the patience and precision required for pinhole photography are truly magical, it’s simply too much effort for today’s rapid-fire pace of content creation.

Still, we’d recommend a quick Google of ‘Pinhole Photography’ for those inspired creatives reading this. Who knows? You may feel inspired to start its resurgence. It wouldn’t be the first time old mechanisms found their way back into the mainstream.

Pinhole artists worth checking out

We thought it was worth shouting out some modern-day pinhole artists taking the practice to new heights.

Alan Thoburn. Thoburn is a renowned photographer, educator and lecturer in the world of photography. His pinhole work isn’t a massive part of his portfolio, but we found it exceptionally memorable, as he applied his love of precision and technique to the elusive field. In an interview with Phoblographer, Thoburn commented on his pinhole photos. “I always used a tripod and an exposure calculator. Basically, it allowed you to take a conventional light meter reading and adjust it using a special chart”. This technique-heavy approach to pinhole photos has resulted in some crystal clear images that evoke loneliness and mystery in a way that a digital camera couldn’t replicate.

Image: Alan Thoburn

Cameron Gillie. Gillie crafted his first pinhole camera out of a cigar box and hasn’t stopped since. Although initially sceptical that pinhole photography would get him into the top art fairs, Gillie quickly became an honoured photographer for his unique perspective and embodiment of the oldest form of photography out there.

“The limitations and simplicity of the pinhole makes photography new again for me”, says Gillie on his webpage, ThePinholeThing. “This simplicity continues to teach me invaluable lessons about photography and the way I see the world”.

We especially love this shot from Gill for its masterful composition. Shadows, symmetry, salience; it’s got it all!

A pinhole. A camera obscura. These are really just two ways of saying one thing. And we’ve got a guide to help you quickly and easily make your own digital camera obscura that will take you back to the very roots of photography. We’ll also take a look at editing a color portrait taken with this kind of camera. Like to experiment? Not scared of scissors and Scotch tape? Want to get some fascinating photos without spending big bucks on expensive gear? Read on.

A pinhole camera is a simple optical and photographic device. It’s basically a box with a hole on one side to let light in. The picture projected inside it can be captured using light-sensitive material (e.g. film) placed inside the box opposite the hole.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create a digital camera obscura. All you’ll need for constructing it is a few ordinary items and a camera with an exchangeable lens. We’ll also show one approach to editing the photos you get from your pinhole camera.

Getting Started: Construct Your Pinhole Camera

Naturally you’ll never achieve the same kind of results with a pinhole camera that you would with a traditional lens. You’ll mainly see a difference in the pictures’ sharpness. But as we’ll show you at the end of this article, blurriness can in fact be a nice bit of spice and can help you get some interesting photos.

What will you need when making your pinhole camera?

• a piece of black paper
• scissors
• Scotch tape
• a pin
• an exchangeable-lens camera
• the camera’s lens cap
• a pencil

The items you’ll need for this experiment. You probably have most of them at home.

Start by placing the lens cap on the paper and tracing around it. Then cut out a circle. Use the pin to make a small hole in the circle’s center (the smaller the hole, the sharper your pictures will be). Cut out the circle and put strips of Scotch tape around it, then tape it to the camera body.

Use the pin to prick a hole in the circle of black paper. The smaller the hole, the sharper your photos will be. Tape the paper circle onto the camera. Be careful not to let dust, etc. get into the camera while you’re doing this.

What Should You Watch Out For? Above all dust and the like, which can get into the camera body while you have it open. Now you’re done making your pinhole camera and can get started taking pictures!

Wanted: Enough Light or Enough Time

Keep in mind that the pinhole truly is small, and it won’t let as much light onto the sensor as your lens would. So it’s important to shoot in places with enough light. Or use a tripod and longer exposures.

Taking pictures with this homemade “lens” offers several advantages: it’s discreet due to its small size, every pinhole gives different visual character to pictures, and it’s simple to work with.

I used my pinhole camera to shoot a color portrait. Because I wanted to highlight its colors even further, I went on to edit it on my PC.

I used my pinhole camera to shoot this portrait. Because I wanted the picture to have striking colors, I went on to edit it in Zoner Photo Studio X.

A Few Final Edits

I used Zoner Photo Studio X for all my final edits. My goal was a high-contrast portrait with striking colors, and so I opened the photo in the Develop module and made the following changes in the Exposure and Colors sections:

• I slightly raised the Exposure,
• I also increased the Contrast,
• and I wrapped up by raising Saturation.

Because I wanted to get a slightly different shade of blue in the background and in the reflection of the sunglasses, I also used the Color Shift controls. Using the eyedropper (after switching it into Hue mode), I selected the blue and slightly shifted it on the color wheel to a shade that I liked more.

Working in the Color Shift controls, I shifted the blue shade using the color wheel and the eyedropper’s Hue mode.

Like what you see? Check out these similarly styled portraits that I also took with my pinhole camera:

Naturally you can take your own pinhole camera experiments in a completely different direction; the sky’s the limit. Check out everything a pinhole camera can do, and show off your results for us in the comments or on Zonerama!

And if your pinhole photos need any extra edits, then download Zoner Photo Studio X, try it free for 30 days, and tweak them to perfection.

Pinhole cameras hearken back to a day when photography was simple. You too can join this illustrious tradition of film photography using these simple steps.

1 empty soda can/ tin foil

1 roll of duct tape (color of your choosing)

2 pieces of cardboard (2’x3′)

Step 1: Step 1: Designing the Box

In order to know the dimensions of your box and the diameter of your pinhole, you will need to use an online pinhole camera calculator, and input the dimensions of the photographic paper you are working with. For our camera, we used this calculator:

Once you know how big your box and pinhole needs to be, you can now measure out the 6 faces on the cardboard. Our dimensions for 8.5″x11″ photo paper were 19.5″ long, 9.5″ wide, and 12″ tall.

Step 2: Step 2. Cutting Out the Camera

After measuring out the dimensions, cut out the shape along the lines. A table saw will provide a clean straight cut but scissors are acceptable as well. Make sure you know what side of the camera goes by labeling the sides as seen in the picture. Put a piece of tape along the inside to hold up the frame more easily when assembling.

Step 3: Step 3: Assembling the Camera

Now fold the sides to make a box shape frame and tape down the corners to hold the fold in place. The back side should open so that the photo paper can be taped onto the inside.

Step 4: Step 4: Poking the Pinhole

Using your previously calculated value for pinhole diameter, find a drill bit or another thin sharp object in order to poke a hole through the cardboard and aluminum. In our case, we used a center punch and a hammer. A drill or sewing needle are also acceptable ways to poke the hole. Our hole was about 1/16″ across, we punched through the aluminum first and then the cardboard, lining them up after and ensuring a tight fit.

Step 5: Step 5: Covering in Duct Tape

To seal all the cracks and give the camera a small degree of weatherproofing, we recommend wrapping the whole camera in duct tape. Don’t forget to attach the aluminium with the hole in it before wrapping. If you cover the hole with a piece of tape, it can become a miniature shutter. Also don’t forget to leave the back detached so you have a place to add the photo paper. Once the camera has been covered, it can be decorated using colored tape. We chose not to color ours, but get creative! There are some really creative uses for duct tape.

Step 6: Step 6: Go Take Some Photos!

Now it’s time to load the photo paper of your choosing, and to go out and take some photos. It is important to remember that the camera does take some time to focus. The calculator we linked in step 1 shows how long it will need to set. To take a picture, load the photo paper, take it to the desired location, remove the shutter, then let it sit. After the required time passes you will have your picture ready to be developed! all you need to do now is take it to a darkroom, which can be made at home using easily found household items! Here’s one resource that explains the process of creating and using your darkroom to make photo negatives at home:

The goal of this project is to measure the resolution of a pinhole camera as a function of pinhole diameter.

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Credits

Andrew Olson, Ph.D., Science Buddies

• Hanft, A., 2005. Pinhole Camera (part 3), Be A Design Group Blog. Retrieved April 3, 2006.

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Last edit date: 2020-11-20

Introduction

Light passing through an aperture forms an image. Sunlight passing through spaces between the leaves on a tree projects an image of the sun. Make a loose fist with your hand on a sunny day and you can project an image of the sun through the aperture that your fingers make. For a great introduction to light and apertures, including many interesting demonstrations you can do yourself, see Bob Miller’s “Light Walk” pages, in the Bibliography section (Miller, date unknown).

The resolution of the image projected from an aperture is determined by the size of the aperture (until the aperture becomes so small that diffraction of light dominates). Thus, the smaller the aperture, the greater the resolution of the image. When the size of the aperture approaches the wavelength of the light passing through it (roughly 400–750 nm for visible light) diffraction of the light by the aperture limits the resolution.

In this project, you will build a digital pinhole camera. You’ll make several different-sized pinhole apertures for your camera, and you’ll measure the camera’s resolution as a function of aperture size. You can build a pinhole camera for film, but loading and unloading the film has to be done in total darkness. Also, you have to have the film processed before you can see the results. Determining the correct exposure time for a pinhole camera often involves some trial and error, and this can quickly become tedious when using film. A big advantage of using a digital camera is that you can see your results right away.

Since a pinhole does not let in much light, exposure times will be much longer for a pinhole camera than for a camera with a normal lens. Therefore, you must use a digital camera that provides a method for controlling long exposures (e.g., via a remote-control cable). For the lightbox camera described, exposure times may need to be tens of seconds, or even a minute.

There are two ways to make a pinhole camera with a digital camera. Which method you use depends on the type of digital camera you have. If your digital camera does have removeable lenses, you can make a pinhole for it using a spare body cap with a pinhole in place of the lens. With this type of camera, the light coming through the pinhole aperture forms an image directly on the light-sensitive component inside the camera.

If your digital camera does not have removeable lenses, you will use the “lightbox” (or camera obscura) method. With the lightbox, the pinhole projects an image onto a screen at the back of the box. Your camera takes a picture of this screen, through a small, light-tight “window” at the front of the box (see Figure 1).

With this type of camera, the exposures are even longer than typical pinhole cameras, because the light from the pinhole does not fall directly on the light-sensitive region of the camera. Instead, the camera is capturing some of the light that is reflected from the projection screen. This, in turn, is only a fraction of the light that originally passed through the pinhole.

The resolution of the image will be determined by how much the light is “spread out” as it is projected through the pinhole. With larger pinholes, this will be determined by the diameter of the aperture. As the pinholes become smaller, diffraction will begin to have a significant effect. Diffraction ultimately limits the resolution of an optical system, even something as simple as a pinhole.

Terms and Concepts

To do this project, you should do research that enables you to understand the following terms and concepts: