How to Make Your Own Pinhole Camera Lens

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I recently became curious about pinhole photography, and decided to make my own DIY pinhole photography lens. The first iteration was just an old credit card that I poked a crude hole in -the pictures from that one were terrible- but as I started to refine the process and to experiment I eventually came to this iteration.
It was fun to go back to the basics of photography, and to try to better understand light, optics, and photography principles.
This video is the first in a new direction that we're taking with our channel. We'll still be producing travel films as often as we're able, but we want to be able to release content more regularly, so we'll be working on various filmmaking (and occasionally photography) tutorials and tips, with the hope that we can grow as filmmakers and that you can learn something from our successes and our failures.
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Thanks for watching!

[@VictorWetzel]

One of the simplest and best DIY I've seen so far haha thank you

[@BlueMantleFilms]

Thank you for watching, and I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Are you going to give it a try?

[@VictorWetzel]

Yeah of course I am just concerned about having dust on my sensor

[@andrewbradley199]

Simple and easy, thank you.

[@nicolinasterbet1616]

Really nice and clear. Thank you! 🥰

[@peanutpista2869]

The best and simple idea

[@SeanAndersonMedia]

I did a build like this recently for my Sony A7S II--it's a really cool way to shoot stuff, especially if you have a fast sensor.

[@BlueMantleFilms]

+Sean Anderson yeah, I was thinking this may be better with a good low-light sensor. But at the same time the image is so not-sharp that I don't think the noise from bumping ISO up detracts from the quality significantly. Thank you for checking out the video!

[@ep3105]

Thanks for this video 🎥 It help me a lot for school project 👍👍

[@ProbablyOkay]

Nice video! We love shooting with weird lenses like this on our shorts!

[@BlueMantleFilms]

+ProbablyOkay Awesome! Give it a shot then. It doesn't take long and if you test it and don't like the look, you're not really losing much by having tried.

[@schrommschromm]

Ayeeeee this cute little kiddi 😍 nice video!

[@jimlanzafane4731]

I think if you go to the trouble of drilling the pinhole instead of punching it, you will get less diffraction in the picture (fringing of edges). Its caused by the small amount of punched material making the hole "thicker" and minutely irregular..

[@BlueMantleFilms]

Thanks for the feedback! I don't have any precision equipment, so even the smallest drill bit I have would make a much bigger hole than I'd get by punching it with a pin. I've read that laser cutting the hole is even more precise. But that said, this project for me was more to have fun with photography and to experiment, not make a perfect pinhole lens. Do you make your own pinhole lenses?

[@youcdl]

very interesting experiment: can you achieve this effect just in post??

[@BlueMantleFilms]

I thought I replied to this, but I don't see a reply, so I may have forgotten to actually it. I'm sure you could achieve something that approximates this look in post. First things would be to blur the image and bring the contrast down significantly. I feel like there would be more to it, but I haven't tried it myself, so I'm not sure what else you'd need to do.

[@opticonor]

Too cute 😂

[@BlueMantleFilms]

My daughter's the best, eh?

[@opticonor]

Haha yeah she's awesome man. Cheers for the great tutorial too. Gonna try it out this weekend 👌

[@Retronax]

❤❤❤😍🥰

[@varunkumar1995]

By the way for what purpose it'll be useful .?

[@BlueMantleFilms]

From a filmmaking standpoint, the purpose would be to get a vintage look. I even did some tests at different framerates (like 12fps and 18fps) to mimic vintage footage. This look could be achieved in post production, but it's a fun and different way of getting the vintage look. But really the reason why I experimented with making a pinhole lens was out of curiosity. I had seen blurry old images from the 19th century, and thought it would be cool try using the same technique (as far as lenses go) that was used for the very first photographs. Just the idea that the "resolution" of these images is only as good as the size of the hole fascinates me. In the first pinhole lens I made, the hold was way bigger than the one in this video, and the images were sooo blurry, but it was still fun to see.

[@francesco5482]

Thanks for this video. I did it, but the result was pretty bad. I mean everything was out of focus. What did I do wrong?anyone out there might help me please to sort it out?

[@BlueMantleFilms]

A pinhole lens by its nature (unless you use a computer and a laser to make the hole) will be pretty low resolution. So if that's what you're dealing with, that's just the nature of the beast. The other thing, though, is that the bigger the actual hole, the lower the resolution. Essentially whatever the width of the pinhole, that's the size of each pixel, regardless of actual number of pixels that are on the sensor. When I made my first pinhole lens I made the hole too big, but after a couple of iterations I realized I needed to keep the hole as small as I possibly could, and then I was able to get images that seemed to work (though they were still lower resolution than what the camera would do with a regular lens).

[@francesco5482]

@@BlueMantleFilms thanks man. I knew before that the pictures caught with the pinhole things were blurry but out of focus with f250 it seemed to me a good value to got hyperfocal. I'm gonna try again before buy a properly pinhole lens.

[@0nly5mins]

Beautiful. I sub asap. Bring more content for us thx

[@BlueMantleFilms]

Awesome! Glad to have you here! I'll be releasing content as I'm able, trying to do once a week for now. If my client-projects schedule opens up a bit I may be able to do content a little more often, but I know for now that's just not possible. I also like to make sure that my content is stuff I'm proud of. I'd hate to put a video out just for the sake of having "more videos" without it actually being good content. Actually, literally just last week, I was working on two videos for the week, and had put about 2-3 hours into one of the videos and it was just a poor-quality video, so I decided to scrap it and only do one video last week.

[@user-fj8tg5mk6d]

Very cool, but I'not understood everything:-D

[@BlueMantleFilms]

I tried to make it fun and upbeat, which I'm guessing is why some things aren't understood, but I hope it still makes sense broadly.