Monday, August 20, 2007

manual control is a must


DP water tower
Originally uploaded by ReyGuy.
Flickrite ReyGuy has posted some intriguing digital pinhole shots in his photostream. Always a generous teacher, he was kind enough to respond to my inquiry with a how-to -- I'm posting it here with his permission:

I sent this to two other inquiring souls. It may talk down to your experience level since I was unsure of theirs. I shot more this morning on the way to golf just as the sun was coming up. Quite a trick while doing the driving too. At least you don't look through the viewfinder. It's a real point-and-shoot technique.

Take a body cap (you better have one), drill a small hole in the center of it. Use a needle to prick a very small hole in a 3/4 or so inch square piece of semi-heavy paper (construction paper?). Tape this with the pin prick in the center of the hole you drilled on to the cap. That'll do it. Now you have a hole with a much smaller hole over it. You can not drill a small enough hole and you can not pin prick through a plastic body cover.

Then just experiment with the shutter speeds and ISO settings to get what you want from the effect. You have no aperture with a pinhole. It is what it is and it's maybe f/200 or smaller?? Ever heard of an aperture like that? All you can do is semi-long exposures. Nothing much faster than 1/15. You use the ISO settings to control the blur. At ISO 100 you must shoot at say, 1 second whereas at an ISO 800 it's 1/8. Also at higher ISO settings the pictures are more grainy.

Sounds complicated but it's not. I'm assuming you're using a good camera with manual control. If you're using a fully automatic amateur camera you're probably out of luck as it will simply not respond to only a lens cap being on the camera. Manual control is a must.

Cheers,
Guy

4 comments:

Lolabola* said...

oooh thanks for posting, am always looking for new pinhole tricks, never thought of using my own camera to make one (sometimes the brain just goes round in circles)

Anonymous said...

I did several more this morning while driving to and from Fort Worth.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/guyr/1185309838/

Cheers,

Guy

Anonymous said...

I'm not really anonymous, just no time to register. Off to work.

Guy

Anonymous said...

I also must give credit where it's due. My first flickr friend, Steven White http://www.flickr.com/photos/swfbuilder/ taught me this easy method. I'm too lazy to use a real pinhole camera. Digital gives that instant gratification one sometimes needs.

Guy

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