With tuppence for paper and string …

One of my favourite scenes in the original Mary Poppins film (1964 – I first saw it when I was six) was when the Banks family make their own kite … from paper and string. Sadly, my fine DIY skills are rather limited, I’ve built several large scale aviaries in my time but give me something that needs finer motor skills and I’m stuck.

I’ve considered buying a body cap pinhole for my (digital) Fuji cameras many times but have always been put off by the cost. My own research, backed up by many YouTube tutorials have suggested that making my own shouldn’t cost more than a couple of pounds – or tuppence for paper and string! Ironically it was the gift of a variable pinhole “lens” for my birthday a couple of weeks ago that finally stung me into action.

I will write about my experiences with the Thingyfy pinhole adapter in a future blog but suffice to say that whilst I can see it’s creative potential I was on the whole underwhelmed with something that costs around £80. It was this that stung me into action and online to buy a couple of generic Fuji X-fit body caps. I spent £3.50 on three body caps and as all the necessary tools were here, including superglue, along with several empty fizzy-pop cans awaiting recycling that was my total outlay for three (potentially at least) body cap pinholes.

I won’t bore you with the “build” as there’s plenty of material online doing just that. But, even for me with my meagre skills, it was a simple enough task and I was left wondering why I’d taken so long to get around to it.

I used a hat pin for the pinhole as it’s a good size for my arthritic hands. My first pinhole turned out to be a little too large although the image it produced was very like that from the Thingyfy. This was at least a promising start. I looked at the hat pin and realised that the point is slightly bent so when I pressed straight down I was inadvertently pushing the widest part of the pin into the aluminium. So, with caps two and three I used the hat pin at a forty-five degree angle making sure that I didn’t actually fully pierced the metal. Just a small indentation which I then sandpapered away to reveal a fairly neat little pinhole.

And it worked! Cap two was a big improvement and cap three slightly better still. Both in fact are very usable and with the bonus that I think I can improve further still. My initial test subject (above) was the nearest thing to hand from where I was sat but I then took the camera into the front yard for a “proper” test.

I misjudged the height of the image with the first attempt (above) but the instant feedback from the digital camera meant I could adjust things and try again (below).

Having noted that I think I can get the pinholes slightly sharper here are a couple of other observations relating to the camera I used, a Fuji X-Pro1.

For this test I used the cameras automatic exposure capabilities, set to the multi metering mode, with the ISO at 1600 simply to keep exposure times below 30 seconds. I found that indoors I needed to set a +2 exposure compensation whereas outdoors I was able to use around +1 or a third of a stop more.

One of the usual “features” of pinhole photography is the vignette that is often seen on the resultant images. My first pinhole body-caps show very little vignetting. One thing I did do which isn’t always mentioned in tutorials, was to chamfer the edges of the hole that I drilled in the lens cap such that the outer edge of the hole is slightly wider than the inner.

So, there you have it. My first foray into DIY digital pinhole photography. It won’t be my last either as I’m convinced I can get an even smaller pinhole with a bit more practice and a smaller pin.