Digital Pinhole Camera

Sisoftroos very kindly got me a cardboard pinhole camera kit for my birthday. I am putting a roll of aged 35mm colour film through it now and I shall be intrigued to see what, if anything, comes out from it. But this set me thinking about making a digital pinhole camera. At first I was over-complicating the issue by planning to make a pinhole camera that was focused onto a ground glass and then using a macro lens on the digicam to take a photo of the image projected onto the ground glass. This is, of course, way too fussy. A quick Google search showed a far more sensible approach:

1. Take a body cap for your type of camera.
2. Punch a hole in the centre of it.
3. Using a needle, make a tiny hole in a piece of adhesive aluminium foil.
4. Stick that over the hole in the body cap.
5. Put the body cap onto the camera and...
   
6. Voilà, you have a made a pinhole camera.

Here's what I've ended up with at the moment:

And this is from my first test at taking a photo with it:

I'm really quite pleased. It's very soft; I think a slightly smaller, more carefully punched hole ,will produce better results but it's not bad. The pleasing pin-hole quality of infinite depth of field is there and these days with Photoshop and such we can add some contrast into the otherwise rather flat images the pinhole produces. I'll try and improve the quality of my pin hole and take some more photos over the coming weeks. I might even try and shoot some time-lapse video.

More of the same

This week has, as you have no doubt come to expect, been completely work dominated. I spent 4 hours yesterday going to, coming from and waiting for a meeting at Pinewood which lasted precisely twenty minutes, including handshakes. On the up side we did get quite a swish Mercedes to take us there so we could at least pretend to be a bit important en route. We normally get taken up in a mini-van and then feel like the naughty kids in the back of the car on the family holiday.

I'm still rushing to get my work on Hellboy 2 finished. I suspect I shall be working the weekend again, but I do at least feel like I'm headed into the final bend on this show. It's been a bit of strain on the nerves, willpower and soul but with luck it should look OK and I daily count my blessings that I have a great team of people to work with. Whilst discussing the project in the car yesterday, one of the guys told of his experience of working on Chicken Little for Disney. He worked on the show for four and a half years, during which time they made the film twice thanks to executive meddling. He said after the first two years you had to talk yourself into going into work every morning. I can believe that. The longest I've ever worked on a project is eighteen months on the last Harry Potter and that damn nearly did for me. Reading back through my posts from the end of that time I can still sense how stressed and miserable I was. This current show is nothing compared to that but I am pretty shattered right now.

One fun thing I did discover last night whilst poking about in the latest version of GarageBand that came with the new laptop was that it now has some rudimentary EQ controls for each recorded track. I re-mixed that guitar thing I did a few weeks back to add some more mid-range to the second and third parts and it has improved it, to my ears at least. If I get home at a reasonable time tonight and Tinseltroos goes out to Stitch and Bitch then I might record a little more. One of my work buddies, who's really good at this sort of thing, suggested that if I manage to get a week's holiday or so after HB2 wraps I should spend a week making and recording some sounds. That does really appeal I must say - I think it would be very therapeutic. I also want to get my Processing renderer working. At the moment my trigonometry is still broken. I might have another crack at debugging that tonight too, if I get time. Music first, nerdy playtime second I think.