Old Dog Photography

So this was news to me — a week from today (i.e., the 27th of April, 2008) is “Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.”

The idea is to encourage people to take a break from our increasingly technological world, and spend a bit of time taking pictures with a pinhole camera. It’s easy to make one at home from a light-tight box, although if you have an SLR (either digital or film), all you have to mess with is a camera body cap.

If all sorts of technically non-adept folks can do this, I figured I’d give it a try as well. Here’s a look at my first attempt at a pinhole body cap for my E-510:

Essentially, I drilled a 1/8″ hole through the center of the cap, used a counter-sink bit to give the hole a tapered profile, then attached some black foil I had laying around to the inside of the cap with black “gaffer” tape. Then I took a regular clothes pin, and used it to punch a hole in the center of the foil.

First, I tried a self-portrait indoors, using the ceiling light in my office at home (sitting REALLY still for a 50 second exposure):

This turned out quite a bit fuzzier than I would have liked, but I thought maybe I was just too close to the camera. So yesterday, I took my camera outside for some quick pictures of a neighbor’s house. Of the half dozen images I took (mostly trying to find a good exposure time), this was the best (or more accurately, least bad) one:

According to the WWPD site, pinhole cameras have great depth of field (as opposed to the great depth of blurry in my images), so I must be doing something wrong. The above picture only required 1/13 sec exposure — so most likely, I just made my pinhole too large.

For what it’s worth, I just drove a straight clothes pin fully through my foil. This means my pinhole is just as big as the pin — according to my calipers, that makes it 0.6 mm in diameter. So my next experiment will be to replace the foil with a new piece, and make a much smaller hole in it.

Wish me luck!