One of my Diploma in Photojournalism assignment was to make a pinhole camera and capture the images seen. This arose from our other assignment of making a pringles camera obscura and I decided to make one out of my existing DSLR based on instructions from this site. Well, its really very, very simple. You just bore a hole at the center of the lens cap and replace your expensive lens with it. The opening serves as a fixed aperture and because of this, exposure times will be longer. To keep out dust from accumulating on the sensor, I taped the hole with a clear scotch tape.

Shooting indoors at ISO 100, I attached my camera on the tripod and made trial and error exposures. Its quite hard to shoot and you won’t know your focal length as the viewfinder is generally dark. You’ll just have to discern from the light and shadows, lines and curves in making your composition.

This is one of the images I took of my hand and adjusted for levels and curves using Photoshop. The image is a bit blurred and grainy. And upon closer inspection, image at right, full sized crop, dust on my sensor was quite noticeable that I edited it out, again with Photoshop, using the patch tool.

Another photo sample, left, this time showing the outside of my rented unit. One thing that one can also notice that dust on sensor is more pronounced here. Cloning in Photoshop removes the specks.

Pinhole photography, though crude, provides a new way of seeing the world. It offers a good break from the usual sharp photos that one is accustomed to.

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