Materials Required
- Empty soup can
- Scissors
- Hammer and small nail
- Wax Paper
- Elastic Bands / Tape
- Black Spray Paint
Step One
Use the nail to hammer a small hole in the centre of the closed end of the can.
Step Two
It is recommended that you reduce the reflective surface of the interior of the can by spraying it with black paint. This is the only chemical based material that will be needed in the construction of the can or box.
Step Three
Cover the open end of the can with a piece of wax paper. Attach it either with elastic bands or tape.
Pinhole Box
Take an empty cardboard and prepare opening at opposite ends. On one end make sure the opening is circular and is large enough for the can to fit securely. This is where tape is more suitable to hold the wax paper in place.
The viewer opening on the opposite side should be large enough to insert the digital camera lens.
As you can see I went cheap and simple. It effectively demonstrates the way the early lens-less cameras and camera obscura functioned. The quality of the digital images vary, depending on a wide variety of factors,such as lighting, quality and settings of the digital camera.
If you do not use spray paint or other dark paper to block out interior light you will get a golden glow box effect.
The following images were taken late in the day. No alteration was done to the images besides rotating and resizing.













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I love those! Own a pinhole myself – Late in the day are great shots!
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In our junior school, we made a double-barrel zooming pinhole camera. (internal sliding box has
wax paper view screen.)
In my blog, Single hole, Double hole, BGR-Tri holes, Concentric Double Density Pinhole, and with additional wide-angle lens as well = well almost all the possibility has been experimented.
—– it was a fun !
Will be checking out more of your posts. Thanks. 🙂
Thank you. — in my blog’s Category, instead of Photography, “Make” might give you short cut.
This is a nice project. I like how it shows the projection of the image onto the waxed paper. It takes some of the mystery out of photography.
Thanks for this link when you stopped at my post today.
Most welcome. Yes, it helped students understand how light & image production worked. They could better grasp that analogue was chemical & digital took the same information & converted in another form.