Making a Pinhole Camera

My young daughter didn’t believe me when I said we could make our own camera, so last weekend we made a pinhole camera. Fortunately for my position as an all-knowing father (as we all are), it worked, as you can see from the image above.

We started with one of those cylindrical cornmeal boxes (like oatmeal boxes), after pouring the contents into a plastic bag. (I forgot to record the recipe, so I made yesterday’s muffins from memory, but they turned out OK, as you can see.)

We painted the inside of the box flat-black and then covered it with some left-over sticky shelf paper. Not pretty, but it kept the light out.

For the pinhole, I pierced the metal end from a tennis-ball can with a needle and then glued that to one end of the box. The open other end, with its plastic cap, was for the “film”—photograhic paper, actually.

I had ordered the supplies we’d need from B&H. I gave away my own darkroom stuff decades ago. We needed three plastic trays, print tongs, chemicals (developer and fixer), a red safelight, and the paper (Ilford Multigrade IV RC Deluxe, which was the cheapest B&H had). About $45 in all, $20 of which was for the safelight.

We blacked out the basement by putting a moving blanket over the only window-well, we put the safelight in an overhead socket, and started loading the camera.

My daughter traced the outline of a paint can on the back of a sheet of photo paper and then cut it into a rough circle. That turned out well because the paper then snugged up nicely inside the plastic lid (see above), so it held itself in position when we put the lid on the box. I taped all around the lid with masking tape, and put another small piece over the pinhole for the shutter.

Then we took the camera outside, set it on a plastic recycling carton for support, and aimed it at the house. I had read that 2 minutes would be the right exposure, so we tried that first.

We’d already mixed and set up the chemicals, so the darkroom was ready when we returned to the basement. It turned out that 2 minutes was way too long—the first shot turned black in the developer almost immediately. (The gray area I’m pretty sure was due to uneven development, not an image.)

So we loaded again and tried 30 seconds. This time there was an image, but it was blurry. I decided the pinhole was too big, so I cut out a section of the glued-on metal lens board, taped a piece of aluminum foil over the opening, and put a very small pinhole in the foil. It was very hard to get it round while also keeping it small, but I tried my best.

This time, with an exposure of 20 seconds… success!

To get the image you see at the top, I scanned the paper negative, reversed it in Photoshop, and then tuned it up a bit in Lightroom. We could have contact-printed the negative, which would have been more in keeping with traditional processes, bit I’m spoiled by digital.

If you want to try this yourself, don’t worry too much about the camera, as long as it’s light-tight. Spend your effort figuring out how to make a very small, very round, pinhole.

I think my daughter was impressed, but I noticed that this weekend she went back to her digital camera:

So did I.