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Jan 11, 2019 04:40:09   #
Bipod
 
Anyone here working in pinhole?

(I know this is the unlikeliest forum on the Internet to find anything except the latest
Japanese digital gear -- so here's a chane of pace.)


SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO TOOK PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA(Scot) FSSA MICE -- Scottish physicist,
first known description of pinhole photography, discovered of Brewster's
angle)

Sir William Crooks, FRS -- English chemist and physicist--discoverer of the element
thallium, inventor the Crookes tube (an ancestor of the CRT) and the
familiar Crookes radiometer)

William de Wiveleslie Abney, KCB, FRS, FRSE -- English astronomer, chemist and
photographer, inventor of the Abney level (used by surveyors) and Abney
spectroscope)

Thomas Alva Edison -- American inventor

John William Strutt, FRS, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (English physicist, Secretary of the
Royal Society, discoverer of argon, recipient of the first Nobel Prize in Physics,
known for his work on Rayleigh waves, Rayleigh scattering, Rayleigh-Jean law
for black body radtion, and for the Rayleigh number)

(Sir William) Flinders Petrie, FRS, FBA (Englsh Egyptologist -- devised sequenced
dating system for Egyptian pottery, numerous important excavations

(Johan) August Strindberg (Swedish Dramatist)

George Davidson (English photographer, proponent of pictorialism, Deputy Director
and later Director of Eastman Kodak)

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 05:10:04   #
sloscheider Loc: Minnesota
 
It’s something I’ve wanted to try but I can’t say I’ve ever done it....

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 05:28:18   #
A.J.R. Loc: Devon, UK
 
Did a bit in the 1970's & 80's. All with photo paper negs. Also did a few using Cibachrome, difficult though to get the colour balance right. More recently made a pinhole lens for my Nikon D300 but have not really done a lot with it.

Reply
 
 
Jan 11, 2019 05:55:30   #
Brokenland
 
In high school this was just one of the classes I offered students. creating a pinhole camera. One draw back is that one must load the shoe box with photo paper while in the darkroom then cover the pinhole, locate a subject, removed the pinhole lid or cover, count a few seconds, replace the cover and return to the darkroom to developed the photo paper. Based on the depth of the shoe box is how much detail is offered within the image also exposure times. So it's not that difficult, just need the proper developing equipment and a darkroom.

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 06:38:56   #
Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis
 
Bipod wrote:
Anyone here working in pinhole?

(I know this is the unlikeliest forum on the Internet to find anything except the latest
Japanese digital gear -- so here's a chane of pace.)


SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO TOOK PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA(Scot) FSSA MICE -- Scottish physicist,
first known description of pinhole photography, discovered of Brewster's
angle)

Sir William Crooks, FRS -- English chemist and physicist--discoverer of the element
thallium, inventor the Crookes tube (an ancestor of the CRT) and the
familiar Crookes radiometer)

William de Wiveleslie Abney, KCB, FRS, FRSE -- English astronomer, chemist and
photographer, inventor of the Abney level (used by surveyors) and Abney
spectroscope)

Thomas Alva Edison -- American inventor

John William Strutt, FRS, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (English physicist, Secretary of the
Royal Society, discoverer of argon, recipient of the first Nobel Prize in Physics,
known for his work on Rayleigh waves, Rayleigh scattering, Rayleigh-Jean law
for black body radtion, and for the Rayleigh number)

(Sir William) Flinders Petrie, FRS, FBA (Englsh Egyptologist -- devised sequenced
dating system for Egyptian pottery, numerous important excavations

(Johan) August Strindberg (Swedish Dramatist)

George Davidson (English photographer, proponent of pictorialism, Deputy Director
and later Director of Eastman Kodak)
Anyone here working in pinhole? br br (I know thi... (show quote)


Over the years I have done some pinhole photography using film and single weight printing paper for film.
I have tried pinhole using a D300 Nikon and a D71Nikon, I used a body cap with a piece of .003 brass shim stock on the D300, results were not as as sharp as I hoped for (much softer than the early works) I use a commercially produced "pinhole cap" on the D7100, the results even worse.
As soon as I get settled in here at the new place I may try again.
http://www.pbase.com/manglesphoto/pin_hole_images link to a few images B&W were using paper as film 8X10 contact printed,then scanned to digital, the color were using DSLR's

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 07:23:34   #
tommy2 Loc: Fort Worth, Texas
 
Experimented several times after getting a photo developing kit for Christmas when I was young and my mother wouldn't let me out of her sight when using her old Kodak. She said the paper bellows was very fragile.
An erector set was under the tree at the same time that didn't make as big of a mess as did all the liquid filled trays in the darkened bathroom.
The erector set won out as my favorite - spent hours building and tearing apart structures. Kinda set me up for my life's work.
Designed and built large structures (bridges) from in the fifties thru the seventies. Many are now being torn down and replaced with larger designs able to accommodate the ever increasing number of vehicles.
Guess I'm the only guy who likes to get caught up in slowed traffic being routed around and thru highway construction zones - the longer the better. Sometimes wish I could be out there watching one of my designs being built.

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 10:29:26   #
A.J.R. Loc: Devon, UK
 
tommy2 wrote:
Experimented several times after getting a photo developing kit for Christmas when I was young and my mother wouldn't let me out of her sight when using her old Kodak. She said the paper bellows was very fragile.
An erector set was under the tree at the same time that didn't make as big of a mess as did all the liquid filled trays in the darkened bathroom.
The erector set won out as my favorite - spent hours building and tearing apart structures. Kinda set me up for my life's work.
Designed and built large structures (bridges) from in the fifties thru the seventies. Many are now being torn down and replaced with larger designs able to accommodate the ever increasing number of vehicles.
Guess I'm the only guy who likes to get caught up in slowed traffic being routed around and thru highway construction zones - the longer the better. Sometimes wish I could be out there watching one of my designs being built.
Experimented several times after getting a photo d... (show quote)


The problem of course is enlarging from the D300 image size. Even a full frame DSLR wouldn't make a lot of difference when compared to using paper negs in a largish box and printing as a contact. I have always used model makers drills to make the hole (usually in tin foil from food packaging, use to use milk bottle tops). A drill makes a cleaner hole (giving a sharper image) than a pin.

Reply
 
 
Jan 11, 2019 17:02:34   #
Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis
 
A.J.R. wrote:
The problem of course is enlarging from the D300 image size. Even a full frame DSLR wouldn't make a lot of difference when compared to using paper negs in a largish box and printing as a contact. I have always used model makers drills to make the hole (usually in tin foil from food packaging, use to use milk bottle tops). A drill makes a cleaner hole (giving a sharper image) than a pin.


Even the thumbnail images from the D300 and the D7100 were very soft.
My drill bit was/is .0035 dia drill bit
I will post an image of my original Pinhole camera later.

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 19:52:13   #
Bipod
 
Manglesphoto wrote:
Over the years I have done some pinhole photography using film and single weight printing paper for film.
I have tried pinhole using a D300 Nikon and a D71Nikon, I used a body cap with a piece of .003 brass shim stock on the D300, results were not as as sharp as I hoped for (much softer than the early works) I use a commercially produced "pinhole cap" on the D7100, the results even worse.
As soon as I get settled in here at the new place I may try again.
http://www.pbase.com/manglesphoto/pin_hole_images link to a few images B&W were using paper as film 8X10 contact printed,then scanned to digital, the color were using DSLR's
Over the years I have done some pinhole photograph... (show quote)

That image of the car taken on 8 x 10 paper is a classic pinhole look: lots of foreground,
DoF, B&W. The sky reflected in the building windows adds a lot. Somehow, it only
got vignetting at the bottom --- where it helps -- and not at the top where it would
darken the sky. I'm guessing it was cropped?

I'm surpirsed by how good the color images taken with the modified body cap look,
considering DX format and that they are close-ups.

I tried the same thing: made a pinhole bodycap for my Nikon F2 Photomic. The images
were about the same level of unsharpness. as yours. I didn't try any close-ups.

With 35 mm format, I was expecting a lot of diffraciton, as the pinhole is very small.
But I took some more shots with a blue filter to see if it would improve. It didn't, so
I'm thinking the pinhole was actually too large. I think I used Lord Rayleigh's formula.

There seems to be a diversity of opinion about the optimum pinhole size--including in
physics. Most of the formulas amount to:
pinhole_diameter = K * square_root( focal_length * waveflength)
where K is some constant.

Sometimes you see this writtem as:
pinhole_diameter = square_root( K' * focal_length * waveflength)
where K' = square(K).

Nearly everyone uses 555 nm (yellow-green spectral color) as the average of
visible light.

Where they differ is in the constant. There was a post about this on the Photography
forum at Stack Exchange:
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/46489/how-to-calculate-the-optimal-pinhole-size

Erick Renner's superb book Pinhole Photography gave me a clue. He mentioned
a French photographer in thelate 1900s anmed Jules Combe, "whose pinhole photographs
were very sharp" (p. 126) and gives a (very odd) formula. This turns out to be much smaller
than most pinhole sizes that have been suggested over the years.

Building on the post at StackExchange, I worked out a table of contstants K based on
different formulas:

K K*K
------ ------
1.206 1.454 Jules Combe, France, 1899
1.414... 2.000 Josef Petzval, 1957 (square root of 2)
also cited by Wikipedial article "Pinhole Photography"
1.543 2.380 Stanford Pinhole Math (downloaded Dec 28 2018)
1.560 2.440 George Airy (according to PinholeWorks.com)
1.8 3.24 mrpinhole.com Pinhole Size Calculator (results work out at ~1.8)
1.9 3.65 Lord Rayleigh (according to David Balihar)
1.913 3.660 Lord Rayleigh (according to PinholeWorks.com)

I think I've solved the problem. If you'd like to send me a PM with the
distance from your body cap's pinhole to the D300's sensor, I'd be happy
to calculate what I think is the optimum pinhole size (for subjects at infinity).

If you'd also include the diameter of your current pinhole, and the size you typically
display the images (enlargement), I can calculate it's hyperfocal distance,
angle-of-view, image diameter, and aperture number.

If you don't have time, that's fine too.

There is a lot of confusion in the literature about pinholes. For example,
there is "focal length". Pinholes are not converging optics, so they do not
really have a focal length as such.. However, if one choses a minimum
acceptable circle of confusion, then it is possible to calculate a hyperfocal
distance (just as for a lens). Anything beyod this distance will be
acceptably sharp.

Lenses are relatively large, so even at infinity two rays from the subject
can strike the lens at different points. The lens refracts these rays so that they
converge at one point: the focal space (ideally a plane).

But pinhole are much smaller. Only rays that strike the pinhole
get through. And while some of these rays are bent a bit by diffraction
that do not converge (like those rom a zone plate would). By geometry
they would create a circle-of-confusion, by diffraction they create an
Airy disk. What you actually get is a mixture of the two.

As a subject gets closer to a pinhole, the effective size of the pinhole gets
larger, therefore so does the circle-of-confusion. The result is the same
as defocus.

So if one intends to take both close-ups and landscapes, one may need
two different pinholes -- just as you'd need two different lenses -- but for
rather different reasons. There is no "focal plane" with a pinhole--anywhere
you stick the sensor you will get an image, varying only in diameter and
hyperfocal distance.

Reply
Jan 11, 2019 21:28:46   #
Bipod
 
Manglesphoto wrote:
Even the thumbnail images from the D300 and the D7100 were very soft.
My drill bit was/is .0035 dia drill bit
I will post an image of my original Pinhole camera later.

Looking forward to seeing it.

I used a watchmaker's drill held in a pin vice. The resulting pinhole looked pretty smooth
(under a binocular microscope).

There certainly are some danged sharp pinhole photos on 8x10 film on the net:

Roy Hines, "Old State House, Boston" (included in Eric Renner's book, Pinhole Photography
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2346/2066282002_2f2d8b8f5e.jpg

Ryan Raz:
Image: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2346/2066282002_2f2d8b8f5e.jpg
Page: http://metrix-x.rraz.ca/2007/12/8x10-large-format-pinhole.html

Dick Sanders:
Image: https://www.thephotoforum.com/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi148.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fs16%2FDickSanders%2FFlyingWingForWebDickSanders.jpg&hash=deae09beccae13f7517ac8d579304605
Page: https://www.thephotoforum.com/threads/my-5x7-and-8x10-pinhole-cameras-plus-photo.149617/

Unfortunately, pinhole photographers often do not mention the pinhole size
they used, or if they do, they don't mention the projection distance. So empirical
data on the optimum pinhole size is hard to get without doing many experiments.

Reply
Jan 12, 2019 05:31:38   #
Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis
 
Bipod wrote:
That image of the car taken on 8 x 10 paper is a classic pinhole look: lots of foreground,
DoF, B&W. The sky reflected in the building windows adds a lot. Somehow, it only
got vignetting at the bottom --- where it helps -- and not at the top where it would
darken the sky. I'm guessing it was cropped?

I'm surpirsed by how good the color images taken with the modified body cap look,
considering DX format and that they are close-ups.

I tried the same thing: made a pinhole bodycap for my Nikon F2 Photomic. The images
were about the same level of unsharpness. as yours. I didn't try any close-ups.

With 35 mm format, I was expecting a lot of diffraciton, as the pinhole is very small.
But I took some more shots with a blue filter to see if it would improve. It didn't, so
I'm thinking the pinhole was actually too large. I think I used Lord Rayleigh's formula.

There seems to be a diversity of opinion about the optimum pinhole size--including in
physics. Most of the formulas amount to:
pinhole_diameter = K * square_root( focal_length * waveflength)
where K is some constant.

Sometimes you see this writtem as:
pinhole_diameter = square_root( K' * focal_length * waveflength)
where K' = square(K).

Nearly everyone uses 555 nm (yellow-green spectral color) as the average of
visible light.

Where they differ is in the constant. There was a post about this on the Photography
forum at Stack Exchange:
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/46489/how-to-calculate-the-optimal-pinhole-size

Erick Renner's superb book Pinhole Photography gave me a clue. He mentioned
a French photographer in thelate 1900s anmed Jules Combe, "whose pinhole photographs
were very sharp" (p. 126) and gives a (very odd) formula. This turns out to be much smaller
than most pinhole sizes that have been suggested over the years.

Building on the post at StackExchange, I worked out a table of contstants K based on
different formulas:

K K*K
------ ------
1.206 1.454 Jules Combe, France, 1899
1.414... 2.000 Josef Petzval, 1957 (square root of 2)
also cited by Wikipedial article "Pinhole Photography"
1.543 2.380 Stanford Pinhole Math (downloaded Dec 28 2018)
1.560 2.440 George Airy (according to PinholeWorks.com)
1.8 3.24 mrpinhole.com Pinhole Size Calculator (results work out at ~1.8)
1.9 3.65 Lord Rayleigh (according to David Balihar)
1.913 3.660 Lord Rayleigh (according to PinholeWorks.com)

I think I've solved the problem. If you'd like to send me a PM with the
distance from your body cap's pinhole to the D300's sensor, I'd be happy
to calculate what I think is the optimum pinhole size (for subjects at infinity).

If you'd also include the diameter of your current pinhole, and the size you typically
display the images (enlargement), I can calculate it's hyperfocal distance,
angle-of-view, image diameter, and aperture number.

If you don't have time, that's fine too.

There is a lot of confusion in the literature about pinholes. For example,
there is "focal length". Pinholes are not converging optics, so they do not
really have a focal length as such.. However, if one choses a minimum
acceptable circle of confusion, then it is possible to calculate a hyperfocal
distance (just as for a lens). Anything beyod this distance will be
acceptably sharp.

Lenses are relatively large, so even at infinity two rays from the subject
can strike the lens at different points. The lens refracts these rays so that they
converge at one point: the focal space (ideally a plane).

But pinhole are much smaller. Only rays that strike the pinhole
get through. And while some of these rays are bent a bit by diffraction
that do not converge (like those rom a zone plate would). By geometry
they would create a circle-of-confusion, by diffraction they create an
Airy disk. What you actually get is a mixture of the two.

As a subject gets closer to a pinhole, the effective size of the pinhole gets
larger, therefore so does the circle-of-confusion. The result is the same
as defocus.

So if one intends to take both close-ups and landscapes, one may need
two different pinholes -- just as you'd need two different lenses -- but for
rather different reasons. There is no "focal plane" with a pinhole--anywhere
you stick the sensor you will get an image, varying only in diameter and
hyperfocal distance.
That image of the car taken on 8 x 10 paper is a c... (show quote)


There was no cropping of either image , the camera was sitting on the ground.
The pinhole on the D300 was also drilled in .003 brass shim stock with a .0035 drill bit and placed inside the body cap behind a 3/8" hole and sealed in with a few drops of Elmers glue. My concern was the brass coming loose and causing damage to the sensor or mirror. If I remember correctly The F stop was calculated around f750 "lens" to film plane is approx. 10", exposure times were around 20 min. in bright sunlight.
This was done sometime in the 1980s as a class assignment for a photography course I took at the local Community College. The image of the train station cause the instructor to accuse me of cheating because you could see almost no detail in the foreground, when she as how I got the little detail I had I told her I burned it, I was informed her you can't burn a contact print,when I challenged her to a trip to the darkroom to reprint the image she declined with a I don't have time excuse. One of the other students offered to watch me reprint the image the instructor agreed, next class I was vindicated, but without an apology and she never spoke to me again for the rest of the class.

The hole in the commercial cap on the D7100 had what appeared to be a larger hole with some kind of a matrix on a plastic insert ( not what I was expecting when I ordered it.) I no longer have the D300 It died a few years ago repair cost was way more than it was worth.
I may play around later with the D800 and D810 when I have some spare time.
The numbers in your formulas refer to what ? k=1.206? mm / decimals ?

Reply
 
 
Jan 12, 2019 09:44:35   #
rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona
 
I've done pinhole work with a Santa Barbara pinhole camera. I've even modified it a bit to use roll film as well as sheet.
--Bob
Bipod wrote:
Anyone here working in pinhole?

(I know this is the unlikeliest forum on the Internet to find anything except the latest
Japanese digital gear -- so here's a chane of pace.)


SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO TOOK PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA(Scot) FSSA MICE -- Scottish physicist,
first known description of pinhole photography, discovered of Brewster's
angle)

Sir William Crooks, FRS -- English chemist and physicist--discoverer of the element
thallium, inventor the Crookes tube (an ancestor of the CRT) and the
familiar Crookes radiometer)

William de Wiveleslie Abney, KCB, FRS, FRSE -- English astronomer, chemist and
photographer, inventor of the Abney level (used by surveyors) and Abney
spectroscope)

Thomas Alva Edison -- American inventor

John William Strutt, FRS, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (English physicist, Secretary of the
Royal Society, discoverer of argon, recipient of the first Nobel Prize in Physics,
known for his work on Rayleigh waves, Rayleigh scattering, Rayleigh-Jean law
for black body radtion, and for the Rayleigh number)

(Sir William) Flinders Petrie, FRS, FBA (Englsh Egyptologist -- devised sequenced
dating system for Egyptian pottery, numerous important excavations

(Johan) August Strindberg (Swedish Dramatist)

George Davidson (English photographer, proponent of pictorialism, Deputy Director
and later Director of Eastman Kodak)
Anyone here working in pinhole? br br (I know thi... (show quote)

Reply
Jan 12, 2019 10:14:30   #
BartHx
 
I have not actually used a pinhole camera. However, as a high school physics teacher, I used to have students make pinholes and projection screens (old cereal boxes and aluminum foil is cheap enough even for a public school to use). With that, they could project an image of the sun and, given either the distance to the sun or its diameter, use similar triangles to calculate the other. Using a basic meter stick for their measurements, it was surprising how close they would come to accepted values -- and they thought it was pretty cool to be able to do that. Pinholes make a great starting point for the discussion of lenses.

Reply
Jan 12, 2019 14:27:59   #
TreborLow
 
Bipod wrote:
Anyone here working in pinhole?

(I know this is the unlikeliest forum on the Internet to find anything except the latest
Japanese digital gear -- so here's a chane of pace.)


SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO TOOK PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA(Scot) FSSA MICE -- Scottish physicist,
first known description of pinhole photography, discovered of Brewster's
angle)

Sir William Crooks, FRS -- English chemist and physicist--discoverer of the element
thallium, inventor the Crookes tube (an ancestor of the CRT) and the
familiar Crookes radiometer)

William de Wiveleslie Abney, KCB, FRS, FRSE -- English astronomer, chemist and
photographer, inventor of the Abney level (used by surveyors) and Abney
spectroscope)

Thomas Alva Edison -- American inventor

John William Strutt, FRS, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (English physicist, Secretary of the
Royal Society, discoverer of argon, recipient of the first Nobel Prize in Physics,
known for his work on Rayleigh waves, Rayleigh scattering, Rayleigh-Jean law
for black body radtion, and for the Rayleigh number)

(Sir William) Flinders Petrie, FRS, FBA (Englsh Egyptologist -- devised sequenced
dating system for Egyptian pottery, numerous important excavations

(Johan) August Strindberg (Swedish Dramatist)

George Davidson (English photographer, proponent of pictorialism, Deputy Director
and later Director of Eastman Kodak)
Anyone here working in pinhole? br br (I know thi... (show quote)


You can make a pinhole digital camera quite easily. Take a body cap and drill a quarter inch hole in the center. Cover with some foil and make a pinhole in the center. You can also buy online a cleanly made pinhole cap for just about any camera, and it comes with glass over the hole to keep you interior clean. Google it. I bought one for my Pentax and played around a bit. You can also put an extension tube between cap and body for changes in magnification. It is now 'on the shelf'.

Reply
Jan 12, 2019 17:47:11   #
htbrown Loc: San Francisco Bay Area
 
My daughter and I made a pinhole camera when she was in 7th or 8th grade. We took a smallish cardboard box, taped the corners as extra insurance against light leaks, and spray-painted the interior black. On one end we made a cardboard frame into which we could slip a 4x5 sheet of film. On the other end we cut a hole about an inch square. We took a piece of brass shim stock, dimpled it very lightly with an awl, and sanded the dimple until a hole appeared. (There are far more elegant ways of making the pinhole.) Sprayed it black too, and taped it over the hole.

It worked pretty well. Like all pinholes, it didn't make a crisp image, but it was probably no worse than my old Brownie Hawkeye. You had to put the camera in a film-changing bag to change the film, and it took some experimentation to figure out the f-number.

More recently, I bought my great-grandson a pinhole camera kit. It was mostly cardboard that you folded up and got a camera, which accepted 35mm cassettes. He was keen to build it, and then was never interested in actually taking a photo. Can't win 'em all.

Reply
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