I like looking for bargains and experimenting, and photographic accessories do not get much cheaper or experimental than building your own pinhole lens. All you have to do is Google "DIY Pinhole Lens" and you will find ample instructions. The project is cheap and easy, but is it actually worth doing?
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All the DIY instructions come down to this: Get a camera body cap, drill a hole in the center of the cap, tape on a piece of tinfoil, poke a hole in the center of the tinfoil with a pin. That's it. You now have a pinhole lens. You can tell in the picture below the lens cap can be old and the hole very poorly drilled. There is no skill evident at all. The important thing is to get the tinfoil taped down and poke the hole as small and as centered as you can get it.
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All the DIY instructions come down to this: Get a camera body cap, drill a hole in the center of the cap, tape on a piece of tinfoil, poke a hole in the center of the tinfoil with a pin. That's it. You now have a pinhole lens. You can tell in the picture below the lens cap can be old and the hole very poorly drilled. There is no skill evident at all. The important thing is to get the tinfoil taped down and poke the hole as small and as centered as you can get it.
Once I finished the pinhole lens I went for a short walk with it around the block. Below are three JPG images I captured using the pinhole lens and the camera set to its "Grainy Black and White" art filter.
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So now we have a cheap and highly portable lens, but is the image quality any good? Not really. Building and using your own pinhole lens is not about image quality it is about experimenting and seeing what you can make out of very little. In the end you have to ask yourself, is it fun? Absolutely!
So now we have a cheap and highly portable lens, but is the image quality any good? Not really. Building and using your own pinhole lens is not about image quality it is about experimenting and seeing what you can make out of very little. In the end you have to ask yourself, is it fun? Absolutely!