Pinhole Photography

One day I decided to construct a pinhole camera, but it wasn't going to be one of those homemade box things where you could only expose one image and then have to run into a dark place to process it. Mine had to be elegant, self contained, and able to make many images without reloading. I would to use my Leica! So using a nail, I screwed a tiny hole into a Leica M mount body cap. This process was not as fast and easy as I thought it would be, the plastic that the cap is made of is quite thick, and I had to be careful to file it slowly, lest a large application of brute force cracked the whole thing altogether. Finally the deed was done. I made a series of images with this body cap in place of where my lens would normally be. Eager expectation turned to dissapointment however when the film was processed, they showed severe vignetting. The image was circular and only covered the middle one-third of the film length. Faced with this problem I e-mailed various pinhole experts on the Internet. Their answer was that what I was witnessing was the tunnel effect (ask and I shall explain). So I had more filing to do. Finally when finished, the pinhole was able to yield the following images for me. My do-it-yourself method had saved my over $300 because a new machined drilled Leica body cap would have cost that much.

 

My garden and the front gate.

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