I made a very crude and simple pinhole lens for my Nikon Coolpix and here they are. I know the lighting is not right but these are the first tries. The lens was made of very thin styrene with a #78 hole drilled in it and masking taped to the lens face. Please comment. Mike
Looks pretty good. Perhaps you could put the telephoto lens on and get a close up of the hottie by the umbrella...... Great photos....
The depth of field is excellent, but I wonder what caused the overall haze? Perhaps the camera's firmware didn't compensate for the extremely low light admitted by the pinhole. Have you tried longer exposures, even 5 or 10 seconds????? BTW, your photos are great too. I especially like how you modeled the depot scenes.
Amazing to me. Great job! How did you locate the center of the lens and put the pinhole cover there? If it is not centered exactly, could that be the reason for the haze? [edit]OTOH, now I think that it is not haze, it is the lighting. Anyway, how did you locate the center of the lens?
Sheldon a pinhole lens in effect reduces the apature and increases depth of field. Chooh , No her boyfriend is leaning against the hot rod. Steve: Hank , I only had the overhead floresents on and will try more light. Sharpening in Adobe helped a lot. Mike
Mike, Looks good so far. How small is the hole? In relation to say an F stop of 32 or 36. Have you tried 5000K tubes in your fixtures?? grant
Mike- I also own a Coolpix (995) and the pinhole lens idea sure works.... a great alternative to taking multiple exposures and knitting them together.... I think the overall effect is very good even as is... Could you describe the pinhole a little more... just a disc to fit inside the outer face of the lens? Or a dot in the middle of the lens with the hole in it? Some pinhole lens articles suggested a "tripod" holding a small disc that had the pinhole in it centered on the middle of the lens face to allow light in around the perimeter of the pinhole.... don't know why that would work better but that's what I recall from old articles on modifying 35mm cameras. Charlie Vlk
Charie , I have a 3100 and the hole was just drilled in a small square of very thin styrene , and taped with masking tape to the outer lens cover. I like the idea of setting it off the lens , this may brighten the pics. I moved the pinhole around untill the whole picture was in the LCD. I didn't even try different exposures and Yes you need the tripod and use the timer and no flash. Mike
Very interesting results, Mike. So the disk was in front of the lens. Back in my college days I experimented with putting the pinhole in the middle of the lens, where the diaphragm was. Never got very good results. But I still have some cheap manual SLR lenses so I might try again. I think most people are just making a hole in a body cap, so that the pinhole is the lens. I really like Helicon because I can see what I'm doing!
I'm surprised it worked as well as it did over top of another lens. For SLRs, I've seen pinhole lenses made from an old body cap. Just drill a tiny hole centered on the cap. I may have to try doing that sometime. Might drill a super thin piece of aluminium then bolt it to the cap instead.
Jon, That's what I was thinking. It might be easier to center the aluminum or at least experiment with the size. I'd worry about noise on a digital.
Very cool Mike. I'm a photography nimrod so, most of the stuff you guys do amazes me. I see the station I'm working on too!
