A few days ago, while browsing Facebook, I ran across a post by the Dallas Morning News‘ Guy Reynolds. He blogged about making a dslr camera in to a pinhole camera.
It’s pretty easy to do, I’ve done it myself a few times. You drill a hole in a dslr body cap, then make a pin hole in a piece of construction paper. Center the pinhole in the hole you made in the body cap, tape it down, and screw on the cap. Voila! You have a digital pinhole camera. Guy explains how it works in more detail in his post – Click here to view his post.
Somewhere in there Guy said, “Maybe you can find a way to modify a fully automatic point & shoot.” Challenge accepted! Well, sort of…
I thought it might be fun to put a pinhole on an iPhone camera and see what happens.
Of course, it’s not a real pinhole camera because the iPhone camera has a lens. It’s a tiny lens, but a lens. In traditional pinhole cameras, the pinhole replaces the lens, making things like autofocus and looking through a viewfinder impossible.
By putting a pinhole on my iPhone, I can get that blurry, hazy-style look that’s kin to the pinhole camera, but I can still see the photo before I take it. Also, the pinhole slows down the shutter speed of the auto-metering iPhone, so I can play with motion blur a bit, like Guy did with his pinhole camera.
This method is really more of a filter than anything, but hey, as Guy said, “Sometimes crappy is cool.”
Here’s a quick video about how I added a pinhole to my iPhone:
Here are a few of my favorite images I made while walking around my neighborhood with my mock-pinhole iPhone camera. I edited all of these with various photo iPhone apps to add a little contrast and to make them look a little cooler.
I’d love to see what you guys come up with! If you shoot anything interesting with your iPhone pinhole (or dslr pinhole), send your shots to me at ashley@landisimages.com. Maybe they’ll end up on the blog!
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