Make a Digital Pinhole Camera

At the risk of dating myself, I feel compelled to say that when I was a kid, I did all the things budding geeks were supposed to do. For example,laptop battery,I made a crystal radio (a simple radio that doesn't need a battery) and a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera is perhaps the simplest kind of photographic device, because it uses no lens. A tiny pinhole in a well-sealed cardboard box is all you need to capture an image on film.
You can experience some of this excitement by making your own lens-free digital camera. For the best results, you need a digital SLR (so you can remove the lens), a body cap (the cover that screws onto the camera body when there's no lens attached),inspiron 8000 battery, some heavy foil, and electrical tape. Ready to play along?
Drill Some Holes
To begin with, you'll need to make a hole in the camera's body cap. I don't suggest poking a hole in your only cap, so stop into your local camera shop and get a spare or two. They cost about $3 each,inspiron 8100 battery, and it's always handy to have an extra in case you need to remove the lens for more than few moments.
The size of the hole isn't especially important. I drilled a 5/32-inch hole in the center of the cap using an ordinary household drill--after removing the body cap from the camera first,inspiron 4000 battery, of course.
Next, you need to make a smaller hole in some heavy foil--this is the real pinhole. A foil pie tin works great for this. Cut a small circle out of the tin that will fit inside the back of the body cap and then use a thin, inspiron 4100 battery, sharp pin to make a tiny hole in the metal.
When you're done, use some electrical tape to position the pie tin on the body cap so the two holes line up,inspiron 2500 battery , with the small hole in the center of the circle.
Take Some Pictures
Now remove the lens from your camera and screw on the body cap. You've just made a pinhole camera: Instead of expensive,latitude cpx , multi-element, precision optics, your camera now works on the low-tech principle that an extremely small hole will cause a relatively sharp image to resolve on the sensor.
From here it's all about experimenting. You'll almost certainly want to use a tripod, because you'll need long shutter speeds. Set your camera to its manual exposure mode and start with a 1-second exposure. Check your results and go up from there; I found a 15-second exposure was good outdoors at midday for my particular pinhole,latitude c600 , like this sun dial snapshot.
Teaching Tool
Why do this? Well, it's fun,latitude c610 , and it's a completely unexpected way to use your digital camera.
In addition, your pinhole camera is a good prop to use for teaching kids about the basic physics of photography. Try making several foil body cap inserts with different-sized holes. You can demonstrate how the smaller the hole, the sharper the image--but also the darker the preview, and the longer the necessary exposure. An infinitely small hole would give you perfectly focused results, but the exposure time would be lengthy, latitude c640 , since only one photon of light could get through to the sensor at a time.
Try It With a Point and Shoot
If you have a point-and-shoot camera with a removable lens cap, you can still try this experiment. The results won't be as authentic because you can't remove your lens, and the resulting photos will always be somewhat blurry. You'll need to drill the hole in a spare lens cap. When you take the pictures, set your lens to the longest telephoto setting available,dell 1691p ,dell 5081p ,inspiron 700m battery,inspiron 710m battery,sony laptop batterythen use your camera's manual focus mode to focus on infinity for the most authentic pinhole effect.