My interest in pinhole cameras is in the pictures, not the "technology". Experiments with building cameras out of soda cans, matchboxes, or railway cars are fun, but as long as they don't deliver interesting pictures (and not just blurry ones), I don't find them very interesting.

I wanted to build a pinhole camera that would be simple and fun to use. And with that, I mean the following:

• Use film. It's quite common to use photographic paper in pinhole cameras, and there are good reasons to do so. But I wanted to use film so that I have larger tolerances for exposure (which you really need for pinhole cameras) and can make prints much more easily. Using film is also necessary for at least the first two of the following requirements.
• Easy film advance. I wanted to be able to take several pictures without having to go to the darkroom between them. The Loch-Lomo takes eight pictures per roll of 120 film.
• Easy film change. I wanted to change films in broad daylight, again without having to find a completely dark place. This is especially important if you want to take your pinhole camera with you when travelling.
• The color option. It's fun to use color film in a pinhole camera for a change (see my pinhole pictures from Portugal on Flickr). And that is much easier with film than with photographic paper. Yes, it would be possible in principle to use Ilfochrome or even color negative paper, but that simply wasn't an option for me. It is so much easier to get the film developed and printed in a lab.
• Shutter mechanism. I wanted to have a real shutter, rather than having to put a dark slide in front of the pinhole. That also makes keeping time much easier and is just plain more convenient: a standard cable release fits on the camera, which lets me take pictures from one second to many hours with great precision and convenience. 
• Resistance against wind. Building pinhole cameras from cardboard boxes is all good and well, but when you use them outside, the image is easily blurred due to wind shaking the camera. I actually had a pinhole camera made from a kit that was made from cardboard, and I had it tip over from the wind on several occasions. The weight of the Clack (which is still quite light in comparison with other cameras) is enough to keep it from doing that.

The Loch-Lomo

The name is a little play on words. "Loch," in German, means "hole" – the German word for "pinhole camera" is "Lochkamera." "Loch" is also Scottish for "lake" (you may have heard of Loch Ness). The Lomo, is a small 35mm point&shoot type camera made in Russia. It doesn't take very sharp images, and its users don't seem to be concerned with what is on their pictures.

So the name "Loch-Lomo" is kind of a joke, putting these two words together that sound similar, and that also have some kind of meaning. And if the name seems familiar, it may be because you've heard of Loch Lomond, which can be found in Scotland, Canada, the US and Australia.

The Loch-Lomo is a modified Agfa Clack, which is a box camera that was made in the 1950s and '60s. The Clack's "optical system" consists of a single lens that is able to produce a usable picture due to the fact that the back of the camera is slightly curved. I bought mine for the equivalent of about 15 US$ at a flea market in Austria (where they are quite common and cheap), to play around with 120 film a bit. But the pictures never satisfied me (they were blurry, even on the contact sheets), and so I developed a plan to modify it.

Converting the Clack into a Loch-Lomo

Please Note: I do not sell Agfa Clacks or Loch-Lomos. This page is meant to show how it's done, but you have to do it yourself. It's also much more fun this way. Believe me, it's a totally different experience to see the first image you took with a camera you built yourself.

Making a pinhole camera out of an Agfa Clack is fairly easy. First, you have to remove a screw at the bottom part of the "lens" and remove the metal strap. Then you remove the that part that has "Clack" written on it by unscrewing it. Now you can remove the lens (two screws hold the metal lensholder in place). The only thing you really want to keep is the part that has "Clack" written on it, I use it as a kind of lens cap to protect the shutter mechanism when the camera is in my photo bag. If you leave it on during exposure, you get an elliptical frame around the image, though.

Under the lens there is a piece of metal with three holes: One with a small plastic lens in it, one with a yellow filter, and one a simple hole. I simply broke that off, because I couldn't find any other way to remove it. It needs to be removed because it would cause vignetting.

Now you can see the shutter, which is mounted onto a round metal plate. It will have to be removed to put the pinhole into place, but don't break it! After removing two screws, you will find that the round plate is also attached to two wires that connect the shutter to the flash contacts on the top of the camera. I simply cut these wires, because even if I ever want to use a flash with the camera, I will have to build in my own terminals and thus will need new wires.

Between the shutter plate and the plastic body, there is a thin felt ring. Remove that carefully, so that you can later use it to make the space between the shutter and the pinhole light-proof. Now simply stick a piece of metal foil (or whatever you like to use) with a small hole in it, put the felt ring on it, and screw the shutter plate back on. Voilà, you are now the proud owner of a Loch-Lomo!

While the description might make this sound like a lot of work, this can be easily done in about 20 minutes (including making the pinhole, if you have some experience doing that). I went from the idea of doing this to having my first printed pinhole pictures in a single day: I thought about doing it in the morning, converted the camera around noon, went out to shoot my first pictures in the early afternoon, processed the film and made prints in my small darkroom in the evening.

In the picture at the top of the page, you can see a white area on the top of the camera. That is a table with corrected exposure times for long exposures that you can find on my pinhole camera page.

Making the Pinhole

I studied Medicine for about two years (when I got bored with computer science), and from that I still had a set of scalpels and blades for them. The blades come in a thick tin foil that is very nice to handle. I cut out a piece that would be big enough for the Loch-Lomo, and then made a pinhole by putting the tip of the scalpel blade on the metal and slowly rotating it. This gives a very nice, round hole and good control over the size of the hole. I set my slide caliper to 0.3mm, and compared the hole to the gap between the parts of the caliper by moving it about behind the gap, and holding both parts against the light. Any thicker aluminum or other metal foil should work, or even a piece of metal from a soda can.

The only problem I have are reflections that cause bright areas near the middle of the image. I painted the inside of the tin foil black, which reduced the problem significantly, but hasn't solved it completely.

Here is a table with the Loch-Lomo's specs.

Pictures, Experiences

Since I built the camera about five years ago, I have taken this camera with me on several travels and have been able to take some very interesting pictures with it. Changing film is very easy, and having color negative film developed and printed is quite affordable and convenient. The cable release makes it easy to time exposures from a single second (which is about the shortest possible on a sunny day with ISO100 film) to several hours. I am even considering building a little Lego robot that can precisely time exposures, especially for long exposures overnight (that need to end before it gets too light).

The long exposure times make it possible to get some very interesting shots, especially when water is involved. The image above was taken before and during a recent total lunar eclipse, with an exposure time of about 2.5 hours. It nicely shows how the moon's brightness and color change over time as it more and more of its surface enter the shadow cast by the earth.

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What is a Pinhole Camera?

The basic principle of the pinhole camera is a dark room (camera obscura in Latin) or light-tight box, with a small opening on one side to let light in which is projected onto the opposite wall. In an actual pinhole camera, this is where a piece of film or photographic paper is placed, but pinholes were and still are also used to project images like that of the sun. As early as the tenth century, experiments with pinholes were made, and in the Renaissance, the camera obscura was a popular form of entertainment and also a tool for artists to better understand perspective.

The obvious difference between the usual cameras we use and pinhole cameras is the lack of a lens. A lens gathers a lot more light on its large surface than a tiny hole, and so a pinhole camera requires much longer exposure times. It also provides almost infinite depth-of-field, though, which makes images possible that would not otherwise be.

But the most interesting part is really building such a camera. While it is possible to buy one, I would strongly advise against that. Building a pinhole camera is easy, and taking pictures with a camera you built yourself has a completely different quality than using a bought camera.

Building a Pinhole Camera

A pinhole camera can be built from almost anything. Popular objects are shoe boxes, film canisters, tin cans, and old box cameras. The main questions to answer are:

Do you have a darkroom? If yes, your options are really unlimited. If no, it makes sense to build a camera that takes roll film, which can then be processed by a lab. Also, loading and unloading the film should be possible in normal light conditions, which is not the case with most shoe box or tin can cameras, for example. A darkroom is certainly not required for building your own pinhole camera, but it does help being able to quickly process and print your first roll of film to see if there are light leaks, how well the exposure works, etc.

Film or paper? Shoe box cameras are usually loaded with a piece of photographic paper, which needs to be loaded and removed in a room that is completely dark (perhaps with a safelight). The paper is then developed into a paper negative, that needs to be copied onto another sheet of photographic paper to get a positive. This process is easy to do when you have access to a darkroom and want to do some quick experiments, but is unworkable otherwise. Paper negatives also don't have nearly the dynamic range of film, and produce very flat images with little contrast.
Film is a much better choice, but does require a more sophisticated camera. The exception here is a film canister that can be loaded with a piece of film cut from a roll, but which essentially requires the same infrastructure as using paper. Roll film is much more practical, because it is possible to take many pictures and change film in the field, rather than having to head back to the darkroom after every shot.

Once you have decided on the type of camera to build, it is easy to find materials to make it from. I made a camera out of an old Agfa Clack box camera, which I call the Loch-Lomo. A camera made from an iPhone box (which is black, and thus very well suited for this purpose), dubbed iHole is a slightly more stylish option. Justin Quinnell makes cameras out of "pocket film" (110 type) cassettes, which he uses to great effect to shoot pictures from the inside of his mouth.

A Different Perspective

The special properties of pinhole cameras make it possible to explore new perspectives that one would not otherwise have tried. The infinite depth of field and often wide angle of view make it interesting to put the camera on the ground, where it can see objects that are very close as well as ones far away.

Many pinhole cameras lack a viewfinder, and if they have one, it may not be very precise. Also, shoe boxes and film canisters don't have tripod mounts, so placing a camera precisely is difficult. Their low weight and negligible value makes it possible to put pinhole cameras where other cameras don't usually go: on top of bushes or rocks, on the ground between walking people, mounted on boomerangs, etc. 

The inherently long exposure times also produce interesting results, though similar effects can of course be achieved with conventional cameras. A camera like the Loch-Lomo has an effective f-stop of 1/256, so even in bright daylight, exposure times of less than one second are very rare. Because of reciprocity failure (see below), long exposure times become even longer, making exposures of hours, days, or months possible.

Water is especially interesting in this case, because its constant movement tends to create very pleasing effects with long exposures. Most images look as if the water was frozen, its surface looking like nacre.

Pinhole cameras provide a lot of room for experiments, and they really require experimentation. Simply making or buying a camera and trying to take the same pictures as with a regular camera won't lead to interesting results. But experimentation is what photography should really be all about!

Examples

Examples of pictures taken with pinhole cameras are easy enough to find, but one needs to be aware that one or even a set of pinhole pictures is not representative of all the things that can be done. There are different approaches, and the resulting images are quite different - just like with a regular camera!

A few examples are my own pinhole pictures on Flickr, the Worldwide Pinhole Day Gallery and pictures tagged with pinhole on Flickr, and of course Justin Quinnell's brilliant pictures.

Exposure Time Correction

The long exposure times used in pinhole cameras require some extra attention. Starting from about one second, the exposure no longer increases in a linear fashion, but needs to be corrected to account for the reciprocity failure or Schwarzschild effect. The following table gives the corrected numbers the Agfa Pan 100 (APX 100), but should work for any ISO 100 film, black&white or color (I have used these times with APX 100 and Fujicolor 100).

This table was prepared based on the following formula (thanks to Dieter Lefeling): tc = 0.1*(10*tm)^(1/(1 - lg 2)) (where tc is the corrected time, tm the measured time, and lg the base 10 logarithm).