DSLR Pinhole Camera

I've often read the adage, "If you want to really learn to take photographs, start with a pin hole camera". My thought has always been, "Yeah. OK.", and then I go off with my SLR. So when I saw this I was rather intrigued. I've got 4 body caps lying around, 3 of which are almost never on the camera. I believe I will sacrifice one in the coming weeks and start trying this out. If I get enough dust in my D600 maybe they'll send me a D610.

Digital Pinhole: The Tiny Hole With Big Possibilities - The Phoblographer

You need an off cut of optically clear plastic,if such a thing exists

mikew said:

You need an off cut of optically clear plastic,if such a thing exists

Click to expand...

Do you mean if you want to seal the hole? Personally, I'm not that worried about it, at least for the purposes of experimentation. As shown in the blog, the hole is extremely small, and as long as you're not out in dusty and/or wet conditions I can't see it letting any significant amount of dust in. And I'm thinking a piece of gaffer's tape will work well as a "lens cap" when you're walking around.

Gaffer tape,sounds like the A team

Or an ex-lighting crew geek. Better than duct tape by a mile.

I actually tried this some time ago. The places that sell the pre-drilled body caps want freaking King's ransom for them (~$100 or so, as I recall) so I used a piece of very thin aluminum to punch the hole in and secured it with duct tape over a much larger (1/4") hole in drilled in the body cap. This made it easy to switch out the pinhole "lens" by just peeling off the tape. If you go this route, know that getting the holes centered is mucho important.

While I did get some interesting results with my pinhole, I got bored with the whole thing pretty quickly and never really pursued it much past a couple of days.

I'll be curious to see your results. Good luck!

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