monday #4: lensless

Ok. Today was a big experimenting day. It was all about getting back to basics. Exploring fundamental principles of optics and photography. About connecting analog and digital.

Two weeks ago, we told our task would be construction of pinhole fotoaparat. Here is Alexander's fancy fotkič built for films.

He can't show us the results how it functions but Katja can. First photos from her first pinhole:

Dušan was a bit lazy to use his portable camera obscura made of shoebox but he spent few hours in a provisory dark room in his bathroom - to see if the red light constructed by himself really works. It did and he made several raw photograms by placing objects from all around bathroom and his pockets directly on the photopaper.

(scans soon)

And what we did today was constructing "lensless lens" for the digital fotoaparat. In practice, we wanted to see how this camera obscura works also on digital DSLR machine. We put away the lens and we made a pinhole instead. There are many possibilities of used material. We sticked mainly to good old ducktape and beer cans - both as construction material but as body for the lens itself, as well.
First, we tried just basic pinhole. After several attempts, we saw that the smaller pinhole is, the sharper picture you can get.




Then, we saw that we can also make more than one pinhole. Every new hole adds all the objects on the picture one more time. So, if you have three pinholes, you can see everything three times on the photo. Very nice.


After, we started to think about the focal length. "Lens" that we constructed was something like 50mm lens on crop factor 1,6x. We wanted to try something longer.
So we took a beer can (Laško!) and we made tele beer pinhole lens. And guess what... it worked! But we noticed there are some light reflections because the inner wall of the can is aluminium, so we have to try also with black-painted can. The reflections should dissapear. Or you can adjust them by squeezing the can in different directions.




The last and most developed lens we made today - Laško zoom pinhole. You just cut your freshly constructed objective and you put those two "optical elements" together and hence - you have zoom! Kako lepo in preprosto.

all the photos here:

> process

> results

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mitja & dušan = great team!