I love playing around with different photographic techniques and camera gear to create stuff.

Cameras like the Holga, pinhole cameras or techniques like long exposures are fascinating to me. As I've mentioned before, they open a door to a world that you can imagine, and with a little bit of luck, capture with your camera.

Why a digital pinhole camera

I love my Holga and the images I can create with it. The problem is, though, that it involves a lot of trial and error, and that can get really expensive when shooting film.

For a long time, I've been wanting to try pinhole photography. If you don't know, a pinhole lens is not really a lens, just a tiny hole in front of the film / sensor of your camera.

A few weeks ago, I built a homemade pinhole lens for my Sony a6000. This way, I can play with it as much as I want, fail as many times as I'm willing to try, and still not spend a cent.

The pinhole lens

The lens itself is just a cap for the Sony a6000 (you can buy it here). I made a small hole using a screw, put a lot of tape on it, and made a much smaller, tiny hole on the tape with a needle.

I have no idea about the equivalent f-stop of this lens. It has to be something like f/60 or f/80, judging by the shutter speed and ISO the camera chooses.

It has a very, very strong vignette (I love it!). It's very, very soft (I love it even more!).

The lens doesn't have any kind of glass, so dust might (well, it will) get inside. That means I'll have to clean the sensor every once in a while, but I'm ok with that.

Project ii

This is how Project ii was born. I spent a whole afternoon playing with some toys and figures, light and a bowl of water to create these images.

The success of this experiment wants me to want to play with a real film pinhole camera. Maybe in the future.

A few days later, I decided to purchase a professionally made pinhole lens, by Holga -not sure if it's the same company that makes the Holga camera. I'll talk about this one in another post.

Do you have a pinhole camera?

If you do, please let me know! I'm really interested in this stuff and I'd love to see your work with a pinhole camera.