
Guide to Pinhole Photography (2013) - brudgers
https://www.diyphotography.net/the-comprehensive-tech-guide-to-pinhole-photography/
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herodotus
Nice article, and impressive sample pictures. Now I want someone to write an
article about a low-cost sensor that I could use to turn this into a digital
pin-hole camera!

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brudgers
With an interchangeable lens camera, a lens cap with a hole drilled in the
center is a cheap approach. There are "precision" pre-drilled lens caps
available for purchase. Machining provides a potentially wider angle of view,
but with a digital sensor this isnt likely to be as much of an issue as with
film...even at the high end, medium format digital backs currently top out at
645 format while 6x17 is not unusual for 120 film systems.

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th0ma5
Sorry to give you homework but do you have any links? Or maybe someone else
does?

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Finnucane
It's not difficult. You need a camera and a pinhole. With my Speed Graphic, I
tape some tinfoil over a lensboard and poke a hole in it with a pin. If you
know roughly the size of the hole you can make a good enough estimate of the
exposure time. Then it's basically point and shoot.

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herodotus
I was think more about buying a sensor and an arduino....

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brudgers
When I looked, most parts-house available sensors are small and even a 1"
format sensors are pretty dear. MFT, APS-C, etc. were a multiple of a complete
entry level interchangeable lens camera. For a pinhole camera with a small
sensor, it's going to be hard to frame a specific subject because the sensor's
field of view is tiny. Even a wire viewfinder will probably struggle with
framing due to parallax. Basically the low cost sensor for pinhole photography
is photo-chemical film.

A hacky alternative for a might be modifying a flatbed scanner. Just step the
photo array slowly enough that there's reasonable exposure at each point. The
good part is that a flatbed scanner is a stupid big sensor and there is some
literature for hacking them. But for a pinhole, I'd expect the exposures to be
rather long even for pinhole photography.

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VohuMana
This makes me want to go build one, that looks so cool! More related to
computers, I remember someone telling me that video games before depth of
field were essentially rendering games from the point of view of a pinhole
camera (i.e. everything is in focus and the camera is just a point)

Also have to share this cool pinhole artwork of the American West I found:
[http://americanwestphoto.com/gallery-1/](http://americanwestphoto.com/gallery-1/)

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opencl
That's still how games are rendered. Depth of field is just adding a blur
filter with intensity as a function of the Z buffer.

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opencl
This is an awfully fancy pinhole camera. When I took a photography class we
all built them by taping a piece of film to the lid of an empty oatmeal tin
and poking a hole in the other end.

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Finnucane
It was shoeboxes for us. Also, remember 126 cartridges? When I was a kid, we'd
make little cardboard boxes that fit over the film area, with a pinhole in the
front, held together with rubber bands, and film advance with a popsicle
stick. This is sort of the whole point of pinhole, crude and sloppy.

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platz
convert your room into a camera obscura

[http://flakphoto.com/photo/abelardo-morell-camera-obscura-
ea...](http://flakphoto.com/photo/abelardo-morell-camera-obscura-early-
morning-view-of-the-east-side-of-midto)

[https://www.abelardomorell.net/project/camera-
obscura/](https://www.abelardomorell.net/project/camera-obscura/)

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tsaoyu
I had a great fun in taking photos using a 3D printed pinhole lens on my Sony
A7 II body. Here are some sample images:
[https://flic.kr/s/aHsmmwzBQg](https://flic.kr/s/aHsmmwzBQg)

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Jun8
My (perhaps naive) question is: where do you get the film? What sort of film
to buy?

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brudgers
In the US, 35mm film is still widely available as general merchandise in chain
stores. 120 (medium format) is available in most camera shops (though camera
shops are increasingly less common). Large format 4x5 may or may not be
available in a camera shop. All of it is available over the internet. Most
pinhole cameras are medium format or large format because a tripod is required
anyway so the convenience of 35mm is pretty much lost.

Between B/W and Color, C41 color negative development is still widely
available. E6 color transparancy, i.e. slide film is less common. B/W is also
a specialty development service, but it's the easiest to do yourself but non-
trivial. The internet is again an option.

