You probably paid at least a few hundred dollars for the lens mounted on your dSLR right now. How would you like to play with a “lens” that cost you, maybe, five bucks? Now you, too, can turn your digital SLR into a pinhole camera by using the technique below.

If you come to digital cameras from the film world, you might be way ahead of me. You likely experimented with pinhole cameras when you figured out exactly how images are produced. You can also use digital cameras as pinhole cameras. All you need is a pinhole!

An easy way to create a pinhole “lens” is to poke a hole in a body cap that’s used when no lens is mounted on your camera. (You might have to buy a real body cap if your camera came with a cheap plastic translucent cover instead.) The body cap already has a flange that fits your digital SLR’s lens mount. Find the exact center of the cap and cut a hole in the center. That hole is likely to be too large: the smaller and more precisely made your pinhole is, the sharper your pictures will be.

So, cover the hole you made with a piece of metal. Then, poke a tiny hole in the metal. I used a piece of aluminum foil pierced with a sewing needle, but you can use a piece cut from a cookie sheet or other thin metal _the thinner the better. If you have a hobby hand drill with tiny bits, you can probably cut a precise hole in the metal sheet. Experiment with several different sizes until you get one that produces the sharpest image.

After you mount your pinhole lens, you can look through the viewfinder and see a fuzzy, dim image. If you have extension tubes, you can try mounting one between your camera body and your pinhole lens to change the “focal length” of the lens. The “f-stop” of the pinhole is so small that you don’t have to worry about focusing after you establish the correct distance away from the sensor to mount the pinhole. Virtually everything is in focus.

Of course, your aperture is so small you’ll have to mount the camera on a tripod and shoot time exposures, even in bright daylight. Figure 15-5 shows an image exposed for three seconds at f-whatever, using my own pinhole rig. (Actually, a quick calculation based on the normal exposure times in bright daylight, I’d estimate that my pinhole is approximately f/256!) I always use manual exposure to make my pinhole pictures. If you’re using your camera’s meter, you might need to cover the viewfinder eyepiece to keep extraneous light from venturing inside and affecting the metering system.

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