Re: Pinhole camera

Jason Revell (jason.revell@unn.ac.uk)
Tue, 06 Aug 96 12:20:00 PDT

With regards to making a pinhole camera, if it just for "playing around"
with, and you don't want to spend much money may I suggest a version that I
made and used at college. It cost me L1.70 about 5 years ago and even the
film and processing was cheap !

My simple answer was to buy a spare body cap ( the cheaper the better) for
my 35mm camera ( a OM10 at the time), carefully mark the VERY centre of the
cap a stick a needle heated over a candle through the body cap. You may
find you need to clean around the pinhole afterwards to make sure there is
no plastic obstructing the light path. (The cheapest body caps work best as
they are made from quite thin plastic). Place the body cap on your 35mm
camera and there you are. You can even set your camera on automatic so you
do not need to calculate the exposure. I used Fuji 1600 colour neg and on a
bright day the exposure was about 1/8th of a second, and Yes I could quite
easily see through the view-finder.
Although the images were quite grainy it gives you the idea of what can be
done and is very easy to use. I have since used this same idea on my RB67
and got very acceptable results.
I hope this idea is of use if you want any further information like pin size
used etc. please contact me and I will try and find my notes..

Jason Revell