Pinhole .....

..... eye.

" OK, what's going on here ? " I can hear you thinking.

Well, what we have here is a pinhole photo taken with my DSLR Nikon camera.

" What's he doing getting a nice piece of kit like his DSLR and then using a hole instead of a proper lense, resulting in this crappy image ? " I can now hear you thinking.

I'm begining to think the same myself.

My first ever camera was a little pinhole camera I made at school when I was 11 and that was what began my interest in photography. I spent my lunchtimes at school messing around taking pinhole photos and developing them in the school darkroom for weeks on end, eventually I ended up with my own ( very basic ) darkroom in my parents loft at home and then got interest in other early forms of photography including 3D and early forms of moving image such as Zoeotropes and Mutoscopes ( what the butler saw machines ). I even made a fully working Mutoscope and flick book film for my GCSE art exam at school ( the brief was movement ).

Although I've never been much of a photographer and until starting blip hadn't even owned a camera apart from the one on my phone for a few years, I've always played around with making simple pinhole cameras and using colour slide printing paper in them to get one of positive photos. So even before I bought my DLSR the other month I had wanted to try taking a pinhole photo with it. I ordered myself a spare body cap and drilled a 5 mm hole in it and then drilled a 0.3mm hole in a piece of thin brass and taped that over the hole to create my pinhole lense. I've put a photo of the lense on my camera here.

This is the first photo I have taken with the lense, it's a close up of my eye and I was so close that my nose was touching the camera body as I took it. Interestingly if you look large you can see what I think are oil spots on my camera sensor, these dont show up when I use my normal 50mm lense, but I now wonder if they subtly affect the image quality. This isn't the sharpest image as it's a fairly long exposure due to it being taken at night with an LED lamp as the light source and even though I tried to keep as still as possible I'm sure there will have been a bit of wobble.

I'm going to try using the pinhole lense to take some daylight photos and may try making a smaller hole or see if I can make a more perfectly round hole to improve the sharpness, but as first attempts go I'm fairly happy with this image. So today's blip is a .....


..... Pinhole eye.