Homemade Pinhole Adapter for a Digital Camera

My cheap fixed-focus digital camera, and the front and back of the pinhole adapter. It's made out of black cardboard disks, cut with an X-acto knife and glued together to fit snugly into the lens opening. The pinhole layer is paper blackened with magic marker. It essentially lets me reduce the aperture of the lens from f/3.2 to maybe f/16. As you can see my craftwork is crude. But it reliably centers the pinhole as close to the lens as I can get it. I hold it in place with my fingers while shooting.

Without the adapter.

With the adapter. As you can see there is a bit of blur but it's not that bad. I'm going to make another adapter with an even smaller pinhole. I expect that will sharpen the images. Real pinhole cameras (ones that use only the pinhole as a lens) are known for their extreme depth of field, and time exposures can be done to compensate for the low number of photons making it throught the pinhole. My camera is automatic everything.

Pinhole on the left. It's interesting what the pinhole does for backlit shots. Foreground detail is much improved over what my camera normally gives. I'm not sure what the mechanism is here.

Pinhole image is on the right in this example. Most Holy Redeemer Church, East Village.

Version 2 of the adapter. As you can see it's still not the prettiest of accessory, but it works. The cardboard is glued together with paper glue, the aluminum foil is attached with epoxy, and pierced with a sewing needle. The outer rim fits around the outside of the lens housing, this helps me hold the adapter flat against the camera while shooting. My intuition is that you want to get the foil as close to the lens as you can without touching it.

Baby arugula growing towards the sun in my window box, shot with the version 2 pinhole adapter. Its pinhole is much smaller than in version 1. Plus the hole is much rounder and cleaner than paper allows. The bright sun helps get enough light through the tiny aperture to make the exposure.

Cherry Blossoms, Upper West Side.

My camera's display is totally useless in sunlight. I built this viewfinder out of stuff I had lying around. It lets me compose the shots and have some idea of the focus. Before I was guessing, which is a bit risky with extreme close-up photography. Yes it looks kind of funky, but it probably doesn't look too weird from a distance. It slips on and off fairly easily. I keep it in a pouch when not needed.

You could probably make something similar for your own camera. Or, with some modificaton, a slide viewer could be pressed into service.

Flowers in the Sixth and B Community Garden. Using the new viewfinder.

Here's an quick way to make a pinhole adapter. Cut a small piece of lens cleaning tissue and place it on the lens to protect it. Then gently press a piece of aluminum foil into the lens-well with your finger. Take the foil and lens paper out and use a sewing needle to make the pinhole at the exact center point of the depression. This works really well but it is too delicate to be practical.

In order to make it more durable, I painted the front side of the foil with epoxy glue, and attached it to this cardboard disk. Just make sure the epoxy doesn't get too close to the pinhole.

Sixth and B garden at sunset.