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