Home-made pinholes

Home-made pinholes

I hope you’re going to find this distressingly simple. There isn’t a big secret, so all you need to do is get on and try it, if you want to.

You will need one camera body cap, a three-quarter-inch square of aluminium kitchen foil, and some glue. Evo-Stik or Bostik is good, superglue will do fine. The only tools you will need are a drill to make a quarter-inch hole in the middle of the body cap and a sewing needle with a fine point.

Ready? Drill through the body cap, roughly in the middle. It’s worth going all high-tech and using a penknife of craft knife to remove any swarf round the hole, so that it doesn’t fall onto your sensor.
Put the foil on an old newspaper and make the smallest hole you can manage in the middle of it.



Glue the foil onto the body cap, with the pinhole roughly in the middle. Don’t worry too much about accuracy: you can always remove your ‘lens’ from its mount and replace it with a new piece of foil.
Attach the body cap to a camera and set the ISO to 12,800 or higher, and the mode to Aperture priority, and experiment in bright light: you should, just about, be able to use handheld exposures.

Please note a few things that may make it less simple. I use Sony Alpha 7 bodies which are mirrorless, and give a reasonable viewfinder image with a pinhole, as well as operating satisfactorily in Aperture priority mode. They need to be set to ‘Release without lens’ in the menu, as they do for Lensbabies and other non-electronic lenses. Other brands may need to be set to Manual exposure mode, though the meter should still give a reasonable guide to exposure.

Contrast will be low and exposures may be rather dark: I’m not sure why this happens, but it seems to be consistent.



Dust on the sensor shows up better with small apertures, and a pinhole is smaller than anything you’ve used before. Don’t panic about all the marks which are suddenly visible – if they don’t show up with proper lenses it’s not worth cleaning the sensor. Use the Spot Healing Tool in processing. You may well get light leaks around the body cap (as in the picture above this paragraph) - try holding a finger around the edge nearest the light source.

If you drill an off-centre hole, you will create a shift lens, capable of giving correct perspective with the field shifted up, down, or to the side. I’ve not tried this, but the possibility exists…

Putting a body cap directly onto a mirrorless body will give you a wideangle view. Extension tubes will allow you to vary the focal length.

Strictly, you can calculate the size of the pinhole to get the best balance between unsharpness caused by the pinhole being too big and allowing light from a point source to form a disc on the sensor and unsharpness caused by diffraction, where light rays are bent by the edge of the pinhole. Perfectionists worry about this, as they worry about making the pinhole perfectly round and smooth to reduce diffraction effects. You can worry about this later, if you want.

For now, get on with it and you can have your first pinhole picture in half an hour from reading this blog: less time than it took me to write it, because I had to take the pictures to illustrate it!