Pinhole board for 4x5 Calumet?

There is a person on eBay selling a neat pinhole system. It's called a Skink pinhole. It fits into any copal 0 drilled board and allows you to swap out different sized pinholes, zone plates, and such. Very neat, and pretty cheap too.

 

or, you could simply tape a piece of aluminum foil over the hole of an empty lens board and poke a hole in it with a pin....well, it works for me. Really cheap too.

 

The Skink pinhole is only about $25 if you want something a little nicer than foil. Nothing beats free though.

 

With pinhole, you'll usually be kinda guestimating exposures anyway so, you kinda have to free yourself from worring too much about the little things.

True, the foil is fragile. It works best if you also make some kind of shutter so that you don't actually ever touch the foil. I usually tape the foil to the inside of the lensboard and use a piece of card stock to fashion a primative shutter to the outside. You can evensandwich the foil between a couple of small pieces of corregated cardboard on the inside of the lensboard. This way the foil stands off from the lens board a little bit and survives much longer.

The cool part about using foil is that you can easily experiment with differnt size and shape pinholes.

 

In 2005 I used birch plywood left from a project for a lensboard (the edges had to be milled down to an appropriate thickness). Made a pinhole from aluminum soda can sidewall, using the classic dimple-and-sand technique to outfit a B&J Press.

It worked!

DaveT

 

Very nicely done! Thanks for sharing. I like your shutter. Looks like you could reasonably get into the fractions of a second with it....again, thanks.

 

Thanks! Dunno about sub-second shutter speeds -- maybe it's my advancing age and decrepitude, but I think even a second would be hard to do repeatably. The pivot screw tensions the shutter lever against a paper friction washer, the shutter stays wherever it's put. The other roundhead screws limit the travel. I originally bought ISO 400 film, but after seeing the times down around the 1 second mark, I ordered some Delta 100 to get out in the five to ten seconds (or more on the inevitably cloudy WPPD) range.

Backing up on that link will also show a much more elaborate body cap adapter I did for my Bronica SQ-A, as well as the last four year's WPPD results. I think this year I'll go back to the B&J to use up the remnants of that film that's now four years old.

DaveT

 

HI,
I am getting back into pinhole photography, having been inspired by a Gallary photo in APUG. What inspired me the most was the sharpness of this particular image. I do like sharp images and hope that I can equal the sharpnes I have seen in some (few) pinholes.
My question is: Is not sharpness directly related to the uniformity,as well as the size, of the hole. Would not a laser drilled hole yield a sharper image than a pin prick of the same diameter?
Regards,
Bill

 

Yes, likely; it's a sure bet just pushing a pin through foil or thin sheet stock will produce curled edges and occasional cracks along the edge. The type of pinholes I have made are not exactly a pin prick. A pin or needle is used to emboss a small "pimple" without actually piercing the metal, then the pimple is sanded with a gentle circular motion, generally with very fine (#400 or #600) wet sandpaper. This can produce a fairly uniform hole with a knife edge, which is also desirable. It also can be done in several iterations, working from each side. The method is described in a number of articles on making pinhole cameras.

I believe larger format cameras tend to produce sharper results also.

DaveT

 

If you really get hooked you might check here: http://www.pinholeresource.com/shop/shop?page=shop.browse&category_id=14

<{B^) Bill Barber

 

Nice job, I'm building an 5 1/2" x 14" pinhole camera out of 1/4" bamboo plywood, may see a very similar shutter on it, that is if you don't mind. Remember World Wide Pinhole Day is April 26th. http://www.pinholeday.org/

Thanks,
Roger Thoms

 

No problem -- something about an object with a design obvious to practitioners of an art can't be patented.

Yes, I'm slowly getting myself organized toward the 26th.

DaveT

 

Ah, pinholes: a thread like this could go on forever. Just a couple things:

* $25 for a pinhole?!?!?!? That's ridiculous. Unless you're hopelessly incompetent, make one yourself.

* Aluminum foil is for schoolkids making a camera out of an oatmeal box. The other person who used a piece of a soda can was closer to the right stuff. Better yet, get yourself some thin brass shim material (available in the U.S. at most places that stock K&S metals, like hardware stores); 0.003 works well.

* Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty of it, contrary to what someone said here, it's actually pretty easy to get a pinhole of a known size. I use a microscope (I have a kid's cheapie one). The trick is to use a gauge to measure the hole size with. I use a few pieces of music wire (guitar strings) of known sizes: 0.009", 0.010", etc. All you need to do is view the hole and the gauge together to get a fairly accurate measurement; from that you can compute the aperture (f-stop) of the pinhole. (To make the pinhole, I use a sewing needle and a piece of hardwood under the metal.)

 

In all fairness, the $25 doesn't get you a pinhole but rather a machined adapter to affix to your lens board. It is very slick for the money and worth it IMO.

 

The soda can sidewall I used was .004 inch thick (one sometimes wonders how they hold the soda in), but for my SQ-Hole body cap adapter, I used 2 mil brass shim stock from indeed, a K&S selection.

From days of mucking about with circuit boards and the like, I have a direct reading microscope that has a scale. The only problem is it's hand held with an angled reflector fitting on the end and a bit tedious to use. I'm pretty convinced my measurements are within .0005, which is close enough.

DaveT

 

OMG! (LOL) that's funny!

I used a micrometer to measure the diameter of the pin that made the pinhole in the aluminum foil...exposure is strictly guesstimate...'looks like ten seconds oughtta do".

...and for people who just wanna have fun and make interesting photos on the cheap. I guess I never have grown up....

 

Sorry, didn't want to come off all elitist there; quite the opposite.

Yes, tinfoil is just fine to experiment with, for kids of all ages.

Hell, one of my unrealized ideas is to make an edible pinhole camera (everything except the film); the pinhole could be something like a hole in a cookie or graham cracker. Load the camera, take the picture, unload the film, then eat the camera.

 

I made a pinhole lensboard for this weekends WPD by glueing 4 layers of mattboard together. Made two pieces 87mm square and the other two 100mm, stuck them together and it fits perfectly. Used a holesaw to make a decent sized hole in the middle and taped my aluminium can pinhole across the hole (I choose to tape it across the back as it looked better!!!!). To measure the pinhole I put it in a enlarger and project the hole onto a piece of paper to check it's round and to measure it. I then use the magnification ratio of the enlarger to calculate the pinhole size. Seems to work out close enough