Getting Ready for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

In anticipation of the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day happening on April 29, I bought a few camera body caps that could be modified to use on our class's Canon Rebel digital camera so we could take some pinhole pictures.

One of my grade 12 Communication Technology students was tasked with researching the process, but we were impatient and just went down the machine shop and had them use a lathe and the smallest drill bit they had to modify the body cap:

It was time for some test pictures! 

We had no idea how to long to make the exposure, but we knew it needed to be relatively long. How about 1 second? Amazing, that first guess was pretty accurate...

But what about the blurriness? We know that pinhole images aren't that clear anyway, but this was worse than expected. Could the hole be too large? Maybe. So we grabbed the first solution we could find -- masking tape -- and covered the hole with it and made a pin-sized hole. The result:

The image was indeed clearer, but quite washed out, perhaps because the masking tape was leaking light around the pinhole. The next idea? Electrical tape. The result:

Not too bad, especially for a 30 second exposure! It's not as clear as it would be a normal camera, but there's no lens being used here!

Time to move outside. 

The following image shows various exposures from a picture taken from the parking lot at the back of the school:

We used the best of these and some of the built-in filters in Picasa to then produce the following:

Sure, these images can be created in apps such as Instagram or Snapseed, but that's not nearly as much fun! 

(Anyone else doing something similar?)