Today was the day when photographers around the world went out and took pinhole photographs.

The theory of the pinhole camera was established around 2,500 years ago by the Chinese, and the earliest cameras used the pinhole concept. A pinhole camera has no lens, just a tiny hole; usually with an effective aperture of more than F100; which means long exposure times. You can make pinhole cameras out of almost anything; you just need a lightproof box with a hole in it (and a film or a sensor).

The real fun is in building your own camera, but the technically inept like myself can buy pinholes for their digital cameras. Mine is called a Pinwide and it fits on Micro Four Thirds cameras:


P1170114 by pattayadays.com, on Flickr

The hole in the Pinwide is laser-cut and tiny:

P1170114-2 by pattayadays.com, on Flickr

Pinhole photos have an infinite depth of field, weird colours and nothing you would recognise as image quality; but they can have a certain charm. This was my shot for today:


Worldwide Pinhole Day by pattayadays.com, on Flickr

Exposure for the shot above was only half a second, but exposure can be a lot longer; this video will tell you how to make a pinhole camera out of a beer can and expose a shot for six months!

With the modern obsession over image quality, it can be a pleasant change to get back to basic and try shooting like they did in the early days of photography, without a lens.

You do not have to make a pin hole camera,

sometimes they occur naturally.

1. I was lying in bed in a hotel room in Manilla, and realised I could

see an inverted image of the elevated railway projected on the bed room wall

due to a small hole in the curtain

2. A small hole in the roof of the kitchen in Sri Lanka projected

and image of the trees outside on the floor.

Kind of strange to be sitting inside the camera.