Making a Pinhole

Pinhole
Pinhole body cap mounted on X-T1.

If you like your photos nice and sharp and don’t like blur or softness then this might possibly not be the blog post for you. You have been warned.

With World Pinhole Photography Day approaching and seeing as how my previous post was all about feeling like I was stuck in a rut, I thought it might be an idea to make a pinhole to use with my Fuji bodies. It would be fun to do the make and having a pinhole to shoot with would offer some extra creative possibilities. I’d never made one before so it would be a fun learning experience too.

As I predominantly shoot using Fuji X Series cameras these days I decided to make the pinhole to fit my Fuji interchangeable lens bodies.

A pinhole is just that – a small hole through which the light enters the camera. There’s no means to adjust the focus and the aperture is determined simply by how large or small you make the pinhole. It’s very primitive stuff but there’s often a great satisfaction to using simple methods.

I decided I would make my pinhole using a spare body cap. I didn’t want to mess up an original Fuji supplied cap so I bought a cheap third party one from Amazon. It came as a set of body cap and rear lens cap for £3.99 including delivery.

Body cap.
Fuji X Mount body cap.

I was expecting to have to wait a few more days for delivery but the caps arrived way sooner than expected on Saturday morning (today as I write) meaning I had the free time to get on with this little project.

The first thing I did was to drink some beer!

beer
Beer!

This is usually a good idea anyway of course but I needed some metal that would be easy to work. The aluminium of a drinks can would be ideal. I will grudgingly admit that you can scrape by with using a soft drink can but the best results will always be obtained from a beer can… 😉

Having drank my beer and rinsed out the can I used a can opener to take off the top end and then a pair of scissors were employed to snip out a panel from the can. Looking at the interior space of my specially acquired body cap I thought a roughly 2cm square of the metal would do the trick.

The next thing I needed to do was to find the centre of the body cap as I would need to drill a hole through it. I marked out three chords over the circle and then drawing lines at 90 degrees from the middle of each I marked the centre of the body cap. You may want to look up a proper explanation of this method of finding the centre of a circle if you want to have a go at this yourself. I don’t think I did a very good job of it.

Marking the centre
Marking the centre, ready tp drill a hole.


I used a 6mm drill bit and it was handy to have one with a point on it like this as I could use that to poke a small centre point hole before I actually drilled the main hole. Once the hole was made I used some 600 grit “wet and dry” paper to smooth the edges of the hole leaving something looking like this :-

hole drilled
6mm hole drilled through the body cap.

The next task was to make the actual pinhole through the square of aluminium taken from the beer can. I held a needle using a pair of pliers and pushed down through the metal. I had read that it’s best not to poke a hole right the way through but just push down enough to make a dimple and then sand the dimple down to form the actual hole. I guess I pushed down too hard and made an actual hole. Oh well, nothing about pinholes is really an exact science so I decided to go with it. I then used the 600 grit wet and dry paper again to sand down both sides of the aluminium. Once I was satisfied it was all smooth I washed it under the tap and then used some rubbing alcohol to make sure that everything was really clean.

pinhole
Pinhole made, sanded and cleaned.

Next I used some gaffer tape to secure the aluminium within the body cap, ensuring that the pinhole was positioned at the centre of the larger hole in the body cap. The end result is shown below :-

Pinhole ready
Pinhole taped into place.

I might want to paint that little bit of uncovered aluminium with some black paint to stop light bouncing around too much but this will do for now. Pinholes are all about serendipity so a bit of bouncing light doesn’t bother me too much. The pinhole is shown mounted on my X-T1 at the top of this post.

Having spent maybe 45 minutes to an hour making the pinhole this afternoon I wanted to pop out and try shooting with it. I took my tripod as the pinhole creates really quite a small aperture and I was sure that the end results would be blurry enough without adding camera shake to the equation. I was right on that score. The photos I took were quite a bit softer than I expected. I think maybe I need to try to make a smaller hole. Buy hey, this is all part of the fun and if I want to put a different pinhole into the body cap then it won’t be too difficult as it’s only taped into place.

I decided to go with the flow and edited this photo in Analog Efex to add some “distressing” – dust, dirt and a wet-plate look. When I feel like having another go I’ll see if I can make a smaller pinhole.

Wistow Church.
Wistow Church, Leicestershire shot using my pinhole.

 

Edit : Evening of Sunday 19th March.

I just had to try creating another pinhole. With the body cap already prepared it took much less time. All I had to do was cut some more aluminium, make the hole, sand it down, clean it and stick it in place. I took a quick test shot of the kitchen table using the new hole and it appears to be sharper. I won’t really be able to tell properly until I get out and shoot somewhere with it.

Floundering Around In The Dark

Leicester Guildhall.
Leicester Guildhall.

I’m feeling very frustrated with my photography at the moment. I think I’m going through the equivalent of “writer’s block” and I’ve been suffering from it for several weeks now, possibly months.

The weather doesn’t help. It seems that every time I get a chance to get out with a camera we’re covered in a heavy blanket of grey cloud which doesn’t shift. Photography is all about light, I need light to work with and everything is flat, grey and lifeless. The fact that I really like working with high contrast light just makes it feel worse.

But it goes beyond this. I feel like I’m wandering directionless. I know I need projects to work on and the harder I think about possible projects the less inspiration comes to me. Everything just feels impossible.

Okay so to take photographs we have to go out and shoot. So get the hell out there and shoot! Dull, grey day? Doesn’t matter. There will be photos out there just waiting to be taken. So I go out and it feels like I’m trying too hard. I’m trying to make images out of nothing. And the harder I try the worse it gets.

And then I start to think, “Why the hell am I even bothering? What does any of this matter? Who even looks at any of this rubbish I keep shooting?”.

It matters to me because making photographs is such a key part of who I am. It’s my one form of self expression. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t sing, I can’t play a musical instrument. I suppose I could write… Yeah I could, but I do it badly.

When I have so little free time to dedicate to taking photos it feels like I have to make the very best use of every moment I get. And yet I struggle to even know where to go to shoot. I’ve lived in the same place all of my life. I feel like I know everything so well. Too well. Seeing a place for the first time seems to open up so many photographic avenues, trying to make images in a place you know like the back of your hand can feel like trying to breath life back into the dead.

St. Martins East.
St. Martins East, Leicester.

I took a walk around the cathedral area of Leicester for a couple of hours or so earlier today. It’s a part of town I like a lot, interesting old buildings and steeped in history. I ended up taking around 90 photos out of which one or two were “meh, sort of ok”. I’m using them in this post.

So what can I do to get my mojo back?

It feels like I’m stuck in a rut and I need to come up with “something new”, approach my photography in a different way. It might not be about going to new places. It certainly isn’t about buying more kit. I think I need to go back to looking at lots of good photography by other people. I need to spend more time reading other people’s photography blogs.I need to think of projects I can work on and I need to actually get out there and shoot the ones I’ve already got in my head.

How can it be that I’ve had an idea for one project in my head for several years now and I’ve never even attempted to go out and shoot a single photo for it? Would it put me too far out of my comfort zone? Yes, I think it probably would. Maybe that would be a good thing?

Video Columns
Video Columns. Highcross, Leicester.

Auto ISO

Auto ISO settings
Auto ISO settings on the X-Pro2.

Dear Fujifilm,

The usefulness of having an “Auto ISO” setting became very clear to me during one of my visits to Rome several years ago now. I was shooting only with my X100 because I wanted to liberate myself from lugging loads of camera equipment around a hot (by my native British standards) city in July.

I loved the way that I could be outside in the bright sunshine of a piazza one moment and then step into the darkened interior of one of The Eternal City’s many beautiful churches and the X100 would automatically up the ISO as needed. Head back outside again and the ISO was automatically reduced appropriately. Wonderful. Thank you. I could carry on shooting without missing a beat in radically different lighting scenarios.

What really helped this to work so well was that the X100 had a prime 35mm equivalent lens. I could set the minimum shutter speed the camera would permit before it increased the ISO for me to something that fitted the old formula for shooting to reduce the chance of camera shake – ie 1 / <focal length>, so maybe with the X100 1/40.

Applying this to shooting with my X-Pro2 is a bit more… painful. Why? Because I have a bunch of different lenses all with different focal lengths. 18mm, 35mm, 90mm, 55-200mm. If I’m using the 18mm lens I might set the auto ISO to 1/30, switch to the 90mm and now it needs to be maybe 1/125 or 1/160. Pop on the 55-200mm and… well, you get the picture. Ok, on the X-Pro2 you give me 3 different Auto ISO settings I can select, which is great – but that only allows for three different lenses assuming I wanted to use all three settings in this way.

Fujifilm, when I pop a Fujinon lens onto my X-Pro2 surely the camera knows which lens it has attached? I know it does because the optical viewfinder does all kinds of clever things to adjust the framing lines according to my focal length.

So… How about giving us the option to have an Auto ISO setting of “FL” – which would set the minimum shutter speed to something fitting the old rule of thumb 1 / <focal length>? You have the communication between camera body and lens to be able to work this out for me, so how about it?

And on the zoom lenses you could set that 1 / <focal length> minimum shutter speed intelligently as I zoom in and out, yes?

I’m going to overlook that the lens might have OIS which would change the formula considerably. Yes, your image stabilisation really is very good but for the purposes of this suggestion I’m willing to ignore it.

Sure, keep all the fixed shutter speeds there too, I might want to use one of those if I have a stabilised lens attached or I have some other requirement.

Would this really be too difficult to implement?

And how about your other interchangeable lens cameras?

I’m thinking this is such an obvious thing that surely people must have asked for it before so I’m guessing it actually must be too difficult to implement?

By the way, loving your cameras! The last time I shot with a Canon body was well over a year ago now.

 

Kind Regards,

Chris