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Pinhole and Hasselblad body

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Willie Jan

Member
Joined
Jun 11, 2004
Messages
950
Location
Best/The Netherlands
Format
4x5 Format
I bought a Body dop and first made a hole of about .45mm. Images look blurry.
Next I made one with a .3mm hole and they look much better...

I made the hole first with a needle after that finished the hole with a .3mm drill and after that polished it with sandpaper to remove any edges. There are lasercut pinhole for sale on ebay, but would they increase quality that much?
 
After determining the proper needle size, I hold the needle and spin the shim stock around it, then finish with sandpaper. Look at it under a strong loupe and back lit to verify no burs and roundness. With the correct size, it will be very sharp. I have never tried it, but have heard of people using arcing electricity to burn a pinhole in to the shim stock. Not sure how you would control the size, but it sounded interesting.
 
I use the dimple and sand method wherein you don't necessarily pierce the shimstock with the needle, but raise a "pimple" and sand it using fine (400 or 600 grit), wet-or-dry sand paper. I sand wet with a gentle circular motion. I think my most recent pinhole, made for WPPD last April, was my best yet. It may have been helped by using 1 mil brass shimstock instead of my usual 2 mil. The thinner stuff is a bit harder to keep flat and not damage it, but since the ideal pinhole has a knife edge, the thin stock gets closer to the ideal automatically. Roundness, and an absolute minimum of edge upsets - tears, etc. is necessary for really good results. This year's pinhole camera was a 4x5, it does seem that larger formats produce sharper images.

I used a .014 inch (0.36 mm) pinhole for a body cap adapter for my Bronica SQ-A (poor man's Hasselblad! :D )a few years back. The pinhole to film distance was about 90 mm.

DaveT
 
Earl Jones [earlj] at f295.org also sells pinholes (made for electron microscope) of various sizes for a dollar a piece I guess.. he had run an advertisement in that forum as well.. can save you some troubles..
 
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