DSLR Pinhole Photography

A pinhole camera is basically a light-proof
container that has a tiny little hole in it instead of a lens. Inside, you put some photo
paper in there, which captures the image. And you develop the image in a darkroom. Now, if you don't have access to a darkroom,
like I don't, and you want to take your project into the 21st century, you can convert your
DSLR into a pinhole camera.

I'll show you how. To make your own DSLR pinhole camera, you'll
need a spare body cap, which protects the camera's lens port when there's no lens attached. Eyeball the center of the body cap and mark
it off. Drill a hole there and be sure to completely clean it off.

You don't want any
of these bits of plastic in your camera body. Using a small pin, poke a hole in a small
piece of aluminum foil. You could also use this stuff called black wrap, which is black
matte aluminum used by lighting technicians on TV and movie sets. Line up the pinhole in the middle of the body
cap and use black electrical tape to tape it down.

I made this one with a slightly larger
pinhole to let more light in. The tradeoff is that the image will be more blurry. OK, I have my pinhole body cap ready. I'm
going to pop it on the camera.

This is cheaper than any lens you can get. And it takes pretty
cool pictures. Let's go out and try it out. So we're in Central Park, I've got my camera
and my tripod.

It's time for my favorite part. Let's go take some pictures. As with regular pinhole photography, there's
not a lot of light coming into the camera and there are two ways we can deal with this.
We can bump up the ISO and we can make the shutter speed longer. For this picture, I set the camera's ISO to
2000 and the exposure time to one fifth of a second.

So you're probably not going to be able to
see through the viewfinder, so you'll want to do what photographers call "chimping,"
which is taking a shot, checking the frame, and making any adjustments until you get the
shot you want. Here are some of the shots I took today. I
think they turned out pretty well. There's so much you can do with DSLR pinhole photography.
You can blend multiple exposures to make a pinhole HDR like this one.

Or make a pinhole
time-lapse like this. Or you can shoot digital pinhole video like
you're seeing right now. If you do mod your camera, I want to see how the photos turn
out. Post them to the MAKE Flickr pool, and I'll see you next time!.