Closeup photography with pinhole?

[NedL]

That's about 40-50X -- maybe f4000?!?!?

I'm not home right now so I can't look at my notes... I think it was around f/2000 or f/3000. I think the pinhole was something like 0.08 or 0.09 mm. It was interesting to see how much difference small changes in the distance from the pinhole made. I'm almost sure it would be possible to get part of the face much sharper, but it was 6 hours per try and I was trying to do it on one particular day ( world pinhole photography day )

The yellow color on the insect probably didn't help me. I tried to do a honey bee a couple years earlier and the brown color was very difficult for the photo paper!

 

[xkaes]

One more reason to use a flash -- or in this case, a few of them -- or is that against the HOLE-Y Pin-hole Rules?

 

[NedL]

One more reason to use a flash -- or in this case, a few of them -- or is that against the HOLE-Y Pin-hole Rules?

Not against the rules. That would have been a good idea! Mine are very old. When I get home I'll dig them out and see if they still hold a charge! Have fun!

 

[xkaes]

In case you haven't run across this yourself, I've learned that sometimes old flashes can take hours to recover from the dead. If your flash has a AC/DC adapter, like the Vivitar 283, that can make it easier -- without wasting a set of batteries.

 

[sc0rnd]

I can't believe that you all responded!! I've read many threads on this site, but this is literally my first time posting. I've learned so much from these pages and I'm floored by your kindness and willingness to engage.

I'm hoping to build one some day soon, I'm inspired by your work posted here. Most specifically this bee photo and the polaroid flower
I'm not so concerned about centering my subject, but I would like to build a suitable device to capture macro/micro subjects in the way that you have. Some potentially dumb questions from an aspiring pinholer:

-appx how long does your pyramid extend from the face/front of the camera?
-do the specific dimensions of the sides of the pyramids matter?

my eventual aspiration is to take ra4 color reversal macro photos with a pinhole camera. Very excited to experiment.

hope you are all having a great week and thank you so much for your time and patience.
Y

Hi Sc0rnd. I finally did photograph a bee's face for WPPD a couple years ago with that pyramid camera. Well, it was a yellow jacket but same idea

View attachment 401789

this is almost a "pinhole microscope" because it is much more than 1:1... the negative is on 5x7" photopaper and the face is maybe 1/8" wide. It's difficult to light the subject when it is close to the camera, and the pyramid shape helped a lot with that. This image took 6 or 7 hours with two bright reading lights on either side. Getting it centered in front of the pinhole was difficult. I tried a few times and one time the little hairs on top of the thorax were well defined in the image ( those are tiny! ). I'm certian this image could have been much better if I'd spent more time on it... the pinhole size was a bit too big. I was intent on making the face fill the photo paper.

In macro photography with a lens thin depth of field is a problem. A similar but less extreme thing happens with pinhole. For example, the magnification factor for a plane 1/4" from the pinhole is twice as much as the plane 1/2" from the pinhole. That makes a big difference in the "optimal" pinhole, enough that it matters to the percieved sharpness of the image.

Best thing to do is build a simple camera and give it a try! For more normal macro, like 1:1 or larger, it can do surprisingly well and the pinhole size is not so critical.

Have fun!

 

[Donald Qualls]

The further your pinhole is from the film, the more distance you can have between pinhole and subject for a given magnification. That is, if you have a 50 mm projection distance, 1:1 will put your pinhole only 50 mm from the subject -- but if your projection distance is 100 mm, you can be 100 mm from the subject for the same image size.

I have a pinhole camera made from an old Polaroid electron microscope camera (designed to capture the phosphor screen image), and it's got about 135 mm projection distance -- comparable to the lens on my Speed Graphic. If I shoot something less than about 5 1/2 inches away, it'll be near 1:1 on the 4x5 film -- but for more distant subjects, the field of view is much like that of my Speed.

 

[NedL]

Donald has it right. It's the distance between the pinhole and film/paper that matters, and that distance also affects the optimal pinhole size ( the Prober-Wellman paper has a formula for the pinhole size ). I don't remember exactly what that "focal length" is on the pyramid camera, maybe 9 or 10 inches.