Pinhole Shutter Speed?

Jestpg · Nov 17, 2006

I just made myself a DIY pinhole by putting a hole in the body cap of my camera. the problem is is that i have never used a pinhole camera, how do i calculate shutter speed? also what speeds of film would anyone reccomend? any help or other information would be greatly appreciated.

Torus34 · Nov 17, 2006

You can work out the f stop by measuring the diameter of the pinhole, etc., or you can just take a roll of film and run a test series of exposures. The method used will depend on whether you wish to spend time or money.

Steph · Nov 17, 2006

Have a look at this website:

http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholedesigner/

With this freeware you can calculate the f stop of your camera (if you know the distance from film plane to pinhole and the diameter of the pinhole). Once you have your f stop you can then calculate exposure times for various films (the calculator even takes reciprocity failure into account for most common films) . You can use that as a guide to shoot a test roll.

Speeds of film depend on what you want to achieve. I use Ilford Pan F (50 ISO), FP4+ (125 ISO) and HP5+ (400 ISO) for B&W pinhole pictures and Fuji Reala for colour pictures when the exposure is not too long otherwise you get a very noticeable colour cast.

mysteryscribe · Nov 17, 2006

If you were very pricise with your hole try this site http://mrpinhole.com/ if not experiment like Mr T suggested. You might also set your camera up aperture priority and let your camera meter do the work if yoiu have one that will. It should be a lot exposure if not your hole is too big.

geoffe · Nov 17, 2006

Is that body cap for a digital slr or a film slr? Reason I mention this is I made pinhole a body cap for a digital slr once and it destroyed the sensor. Second of all the digital pinhole needed to be very precise. I began with a .10 and it was a bit on the soft side. Going to .09 made a huge difference. For some reason the focal length does not make much of a difference on a film camera like it does on a digital. I learned that next time I make a pinhole cap for a digital slr, I will cover the pinhole with glass. Dust is a pain in the butt to get off the sensor.